This week, Ashley focused on how to best serve struggling writers. That has been one of my biggest challenges while we have been virtual. Many students struggle with not only formulating sentences, but actually typing the content. It can be difficult to engage students and monitor their work while being virtual because you can't hover over them as you would in person. It's a constant back and forth game of sending Google Docs and making comments.
Ashley's first tip was to simplify and break it down. As a 6th grade teacher, I can be quite guilty of sometimes forgetting that many students enter my classroom with little to no knowledge of the writing process. She recommended utilizing graphic organizers and encouraging students to complete them with you, step by step. Her second tip was to provide students with choice! I can safely say, this has made a huge impact already. Just this week, I let students choose a topic for us to write out an argument for as a class. They decided to discuss whether or not social media was good for us. By giving them choice, I noticed my students were much more engaged, willing to unmute and write in the chat! Ashley's third tip was to give students engaging writing prompts. This is something I have trying to get better at, even with my morning question for students. I've been trying to ask things like "what would you like to find at the end of a rainbow?" instead of "tell me your favorite thing about March". While both questions are great, the more engaging questions really get students thinking. Her fourth tipe was to model the writing process. I worried that it would be difficult to model writing while virtual, but it's actually been great! Having students follow along and watch me type out an argument has prompted them to be more engaged. Ashley's last tip was to consider that the lesson still needs to be fun. Giving student the opportunity to make real world connections, or apply previous knowledge gets them so excited for a lesson. For example, this week, we analyzed how companies can persuade you to buy products using ethos, logos and pathos. Our warm up question was "Have you ever been persuaded to buy something because you saw it on TikTok or Youtube?" So many of my students were beyond excited to write about a time they were convinced to buy something.
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