Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Determine Importance and Synthesizing Information

Determining Importance and Synthesizing Information

Our shared writing goal in 5th Grade is to develop students' abilities to support their writing with evidence in all content areas.  Along with this goal, students are also held accountable for age appropriate: grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure.

Teaching only writing and skills this year has enabled me to delve deeply with students while they hone their skills at citing evidence from the text to support their claims/inferences. We've practiced using materials from the EL curriculum and from Scope magazine along with evidence from text read aloud.

The three main assignments where we practiced citing evidence were:
  • the mid-unit assessment in the EL curriculum. Students had already done a close reading of the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). They were then asked to read a complex text about a family who fled Kosovo during the Serbian civil war. The final task was to synthesize the two texts and analyze human rights violations in the Kosovo article and relate them directly to articles in the UDHR.  Since students were accutely familiar with the UDHR, they readily discovered violations in the Kosovo article and quoted the UDHR and article when supporting their claims.
  • an essay synthesizing paired texts from a Scope magazine. The first article detailed the history of candy and how America's love of candy developed over 200 years. The second article contained facts about the dangers of sugar that Americans now know about in 2015. Students responded to the prompt: How have Americans' ideas about sugar changed over the past 200 years? Students were able to make claims about early ideas of candy being healthy to current information about sugar in our diet. They were able to respond quoting the text; however, the engagement and interest in the topic was somewhat lacking.
  • a written response detailing any human rights violations in our read aloud novel, Under the Blood Red Sun. Students were able to identify those violations and associate them directly to articles in the UDHR. Here students had a high level of engagement and interest.
The next step of our writing journey entails learning how to write persuasively. Originally I had a debate issue from our last Scope magazine in mind, but I feared a lack of engagement and interest. So I thought the students could decide which issue was most pressing for them. Hands down, the issue near and dear to fifth graders is the six people to a table rule in the Bill Roberts lunchroom. The challenge is not necessarily citing the text; it's finding information. Not much has been written on the subject. Therefore, we need to create our own "text."  Ah-ha! Inquiry!

After much brainstorming and lively discourse, we zeroed in on five areas of research whose results will be used as text evidence in a persuasive essay:
  • Big question is "Should more than six students be allowed at a lunch table at Bill Roberts?" Survey team is developing a survey for grades 4, 5, and 6. They will then present their findings using graphs and charts.
  • Interview team is developing questions to ask the principals and Miss Jane. Look for lots of quotes from these interviews as supporting evidence!
  • Other schools team is investigating what other DPS schools do in their lunchrooms.
  • Another team is planning an experiment at grades 4, 5, and 6 lunchtimes to allow up to 8 students at a table and charting observations regarding number of students at a table, noise level, and behavior issues. These could be some interesting results.
  • Internet team is researching articles that address school lunchroom management such as traffic flow, behavior, and noise.
Since we are just starting our inquiry into this very important debate, my next post will provide an update on how the inquiry and persuasive writing is going. In the meantime, I'm anticipating some rousing mini-lessons on the unique style of persuasive writing using mentor texts.

3 comments:

  1. I can tell you from a parent perspective this has created quite the discussion at the dinner table. He is also very excited to work with a group of peers and start persuading people!!! What more can you ask for as a teacher........rigorously working on all of these standards along with creating excitement about the assignment!

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  2. I can tell you from a parent perspective this has created quite the discussion at the dinner table. He is also very excited to work with a group of peers and start persuading people!!! What more can you ask for as a teacher........rigorously working on all of these standards along with creating excitement about the assignment!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes! A topic of discussion in the Lewis household as well. I can't tell you how strongly I feel about engagement these days in our world of over - assessing. I know from my fifth grader that she is very engaged in the topic of lunch room seating as well as your previous work on the UDHR.

    I think your decision to give the choice to students has brought the engagement up and added an extremely authentic inquiry piece to their work. Thank you!

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