On Monday there was an ISE day, and we got to sit in on the meetings with the principal, superintendent, and counselors. Kallie presented to the teachers on Google docs. I thought she did an excellent job! During the meetings, I learned a little bit about grant writing and the website donorschoose.org, where teachers can post project ideas online. Individuals can then pick projects that they want to help fund. This is an awesome website to help teachers who are underfunded (which is probably most of them!).
This week, we discussed folk tales, tall tales, and fairy tales. I read The Paper Bag Princess aloud to the students. We talked about how this story didn't follow the normal elements of a fairy tale. We also talked about idioms and figurative language. I encouraged the students to see if they could add some idioms to their stories.
This week the students also did WV Writes, previously called Writing Road Map. They did a pretty good job with focusing on the assignment. However, I don't really like this program because I don't think it scores properly. Some kids that I know are good writers were scoring twos and threes, while students who were poorer writers (some didn't even write about the topic!) were scoring higher. I think it's a useful tool for teaching kids how to pay attention to what is expected of them as they write. They can see that they need to include certain things to get a higher score. However, I do not feel it is an accurate measure of students' writing abilities.
The donorschoose website sounds great for seeking funding for classroom projects. A student in one of my evening classes said she has received funding for sets of novels from the site before. I am concerned about what you are noticing with the WV Writes scoring. This is not the first time I've heard that it seems to be scoring low for good writing. I'm interested in what the feedback is actually suggesting students do to revise. Have you seen the student reports after taking the assessment? If so, can you share...
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