Day 1 observations- Conventions
While
investigating the students writing I spent time examining their use of conventions
on the first day of their large writing project. My hope was to see how the
students improve in this specific area of writing over the course of this
study, specifically at the end of this writing piece and the final on-demand
assessment. Below is broken down observations about each case. The writing on
day one showed me that students needed a significant amount of work in the
areas of spacing and punctuation. Through the use of buddy writing and teacher
conferencing my hope was to see the students improving in both of these areas. I
used observation from student conferences and analysis of the students written
papers to determine how they did with conventions.
Chimpanzees (3 students are working as a group on
this writing project)
“Only used 1 period for 2 sentences.”
“small amount of space between words”
“capital d in anD”
“b reversal”
Tarantulas
“It’s used incorrectly”
“inconsistent spacing”
“letters aren’t sitting on the line”
Skunks
“Good use of punctuation.”
“3 sentences; inconsistent start with punctuation”
Wolves
“no periods to break sentences”
“no commas”
“capitals to start and punctuation to end”
Black Bears
“words spelled correctly”
“good use of punctuation”
“little to no spacing between words”
Elephants
“Mix of capitals and lowercase (alphabet soup)”
“3-4 words per line”
“no punctuation, only final”
“and, and, and”
As a first grade teacher, I can relate to what you are seeing in the classroom. It’s funny that you say your students needed significant work in the area of spacing and punctuation. I have drilled punctuation since the first week of school and my students are still forgetting punctuation marks all the time! If you find a way to get them to remember this every time they write a sentence please let me know! My students are the same way with capital letters. It doesn't seem that this was an issue for you. I like that you were able to observe specifically the errors that you were seeing in each group.
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