About a week ago I had the opportunity to plan and teach students in a high school for two days. I just want to share the experience and what we did with them. I co-taught with another student in my class and we together came up with a great writing assignment that follows best practice.
For this two days of teaching we had students write a script for a commercial of a toy that they chose out of a bag. This required them to be creative especially since some of the "toys" in the bag weren't actually toys. The students were allowed to make up what they toy did so this also allowed the students to be very creative with this assignment. To get the students ready for this assignment we had them watch a commercial for a Barbie house and then we had a discussion about what they noticed in the commercial so that they could get some idea about what to do. Then we went over what the script should look like. We gave them an example of a writing script for a commercial and told them this is what theirs needed to look like.
Since research as soon that teaching grammar through context is the way to go and the best way for students to learn grammar. So we decided to have students focus on punctuation such as the colon, comma, ellipsis, and more. It was better to have the students focus on one grammar concept than overwhelming them with more.
So for the second day of our teaching we had them work some more on their script and then we had them peer review each others work. During the peer review we wanted students to focus on the punctuation since that was the main idea for this project. After the peer review and some practice we had students present what they had. Another huge thing that we did to prepare students was giving them a model of a script that we created and we acted it out for them and that was something really helpful. The students did a fantastic job and this project is something that I would consider using in the future and something I wanted to share so that other teachers have the opportunity to use this or try it.
Here is a great website that gives ideas for different genres that students can write in to learn grammar and to be creative.
Well all know that boys and girls are interested in different topics and I think its important to think about that when assigning a writing assignment. As teachers we need to be flexible about topic choice because otherwise boys will be uninterested at writing at all. Yes, its true that boys like to write about violence and that they like to be funny. I think teachers need to give boys a little more leniency to what they can and cannot write about. Ralph Fletcher agrees and his book Boy Writers talks about ways to get boys interested in writing and how to relate to them as writers.
Overall I think the book was great and had a lot of great ideas to help all teachers but its good to note that a lot of this book assumes things about boys. It assumes that boys like to write about violence and it assumes that boys want to be humorous in their writing. So its always good to remember ,as always, that not all boys are the same and this book fails to incorporate that message. It is a great book with a lot of great ideas but just keep in mind that not all boys are the same.
It some good ideas it had that you can incorporate into your classroom. One great assignment that I think that would work really well is having kids is having them draw a place that they remember from childhood like their neighborhood, a park, or anything similar to that. Then after they draw, the students write and describe that area and go into depth about where they spent a lot of time and where they weren't allowed or etc. I think this is good way to help students imagine something so that they can use that creativity to write.
Here is a website that gives some great journal topics to consider which could speak to boys and girls in your classroom. Maybe they will inspire them to want to write.
