Good afternoon parents,
In your child’s folder today, among a bunch of graded papers, you should find a writing rubric attached to some pieces of writing. Depending on your child’s attendance and completion, there could be between 1 and 3 pieces of writing. I used the same rubric paper to grade all, just using a different color for each writing piece. By doing this, you can see how your child scores in the same areas across several written pieces. They received 2 grades for each writing piece. One grade was on the “Conventions”. This is their spelling, use of word wall words, capitalization, and punctuation. You can see descriptors for what constitutes writing like a Kindergartner, First Grader, Second Grader, and even how to aspire to write like a Third Grader. The students are very familiar with this rubric. We’ve used a similar one for every writing unit this year. We talk about what is needed to write like a Second Grader and refer back to this rubric often as we revise and edit our longer writings. The second grade was listed as OREO. This stands for Opinion, Reason, Example or Explanation, and Opinion (restated). This is our plan when writing an opinion piece. The students are well familiar with OREO and what should be found in their writing. Please look over these writings with your child. Discuss the rubric with them. Ask them to point out what they did well on, especially consistently. Have them celebrate writing like a Second Grader on those parts. Then pay attention to where they need to work harder next time. Was there something they forgot (like the last O, restating their opinion, or maybe using capitalization correctly). Remind them to check for those more difficult areas each time they write. I talk about these things all the time in here, but sometimes kids need to hear that what I say at school is the same as what you want to see coming home. They need to know we’re on the same page because we’re a team working together to help them do their best! I tell the students that they are great readers…and this is actually an advantage to their writing. By being a great reader, they are able to re-read their work and realize when the words they wrote DON’T look like the words they read in books. That’s when they should go back and make a correction. It is natural and normal for kids to be MUCH better readers than writers, as one helps the other. But we have to let our reading powers help our writing abilities. The large message I have tried to get across to students this year is that they are smart and have amazing ideas (they really do blow my mind sometimes!)…BUT if they can not get their message across to the reader, then all of their ideas go nowhere. Having those great ideas is only half the battle; we need to be able to communicate those ideas to others. Sometimes we get to do that verbally. And sometimes we have to be able to communicate in writing. So, if your child is struggling with the “Conventions” of writing, this may be getting in the way of their message being understood. Messy handwriting, no spaces between words, not spelling words correctly, not using what we have learned in phonics to spell words, not using the word wall words, using no punctuation or incorrect punctuation, and not capitalizing words correctly…these are all the culprits. All of these will make your message harder to be received. Even in this day and age of autocorrect, talk text, and programs that will correct your writing…we all know that there are still mistakes made. My autocorrect has NEVER spelled my middle child’s name correctly…it tries to change it EVERY SINGLE TIME. When I “swipey type” on my phone, it changes the word “because” to “negate” every time. There are many words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently, and thus talk text will not always get them right. Even the suggestions of word processing programs can’t accurately make suggestions of spellings if you aren’t in the general ballpark of a word. This is why we need to learn to take our time to ensure that we do everything we can for our message to be conveyed. The easiest of these is word wall words: they are right in front of us on the wall, and there’s a copy in their writing binders. They can read the words…so they should be able to find them to spell them. The words we expect them to spell correctly are those using the phonics concepts we’ve taught (and that they learned in prior grades). We don’t expect them to be able to spell words with concepts we haven’t taught…but we do want them to always try their best. Capitals and punctuation often go hand in hand…where you see a period, you should next see a capital letter. They all know when to use both, but they don’t always put this into practice. Handwriting can get in the way as well, with work that is too messy to read or letters that are capitals all throughout words. I appreciate you taking some time to look over your child’s writing with him/her and talking about their GLOWS (what is going well) and GROWS (what they need to work on). We will continue with opinion writing for several more weeks, but many of these lessons stretch across all forms of writing. Thank you again for all of your support. Susan Bohm 😊
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Ms. Bohm
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May 2022
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