Survey of Instructional Strategies

Implementation 1 – Providing Practice Followed By Feedback on Student Results

Link to Strategy 1

I teach half day kindergarten in a suburban school district. The student demographics within the class consist of 53% English Language Learners (ELL), 73.3% girls, 26.7% boys, and over the course of the year, a student turnover rate of 33%.

This strategy will address the learning goal “I can tell the beginning, middle, and end of a story.” This student friendly goal is based upon the district standard, “Student understands that writing has different purposes” and the state’s Common Core Standard for kindergartners to understand the difference between and are able to produce three types of writing: opinion, narrative, and informational.

This learning goal addresses a student’s understanding of a sequence of events within a story. The student is able to recall the story’s sequence of events, producing text and pictures. Student work indicates an analysis and interpretation of the story, producing a narrative piece of writing.

We will read The Three Little Pigs on the Kindle application installed on my Active Board. As we read the story, we will discuss the problems student see in the book, possible solutions as seen by the students, and the solutions found in the book. We will review the book again, taking different students’ opinions of the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Students are provided with several writing formats for their narrative: 1) Single sheets of paper with a drawing box on the top half, writing lines on the lower half. These sheets can be stapled together to create a book. 2) Premade booklets of primary writing paper. Each page has a graduated edge, helping students perceive the title page, beginning, middle, and ending pages. See example below. 3) Small premade flipbooks with graduated edges and no lines. These books are for students considered emergent writers or who are overwhelmed by large format activities. Due to size, these flipbooks fit easily into primary students’ hands for student retell based upon student drawings.

This activity is one form of practice for narrative writing based upon story retell. Students build up to this narrative writing skill with previous retells scripted with illustrations. These scripted narratives are provided with our reading curriculum, teaching students to retell the events of a story in correct sequence.

Students are pushed beyond the script with this narrative activity, putting into practice their knowledge of sequencing events along with writing and drawing skills. Support of student writing is threefold: 1) Students may access the book on the smart board at any time during the writing period. 2) Students may review teacher samples at any time during the writing period. 3) Students receive feedback from me during small group sessions. Students bring their writing pieces to the table, 3 to 4 students at a time, for review of their writing content, organization, and conventions. Since this lesson will focus on the narrative sequence, teacher feedback will be based upon students’ ability to retell their narratives verbally and in writing and/or drawing. The group will listen and discuss their various interpretations of sequence.

Predicted outcomes of this activity based upon class demographics are 50% of the class will use the small flipbooks or the booklet of paper with the graduated edges. I have found my ELL students to prefer guidance on the concept of sequencing events. The booklet’s and flipbook’s graduated page edges prompt the students to write one event per page in a sequenced order. ELL students refer back to the Kindle book and teacher samples often through the writing process. These resources provide support in story recall and word formation. Non ELL students tend to use separate sheets of paper to create a book of customized length. I find students who are confident in their writing ability will write more to create larger booklets.

In addition to feedback on narrative sequence, feedback for confident writers will most likely address writing conventions such as correct capitalization and punctuation at the end of a sentence. Confident writers also need encouragement in adding detail to their writing. Students with less writing ability may need vocabulary support in order to sequence their narratives. In addition to receiving support in sequencing, these students will receive some feedback to support sound-letter identification, and writing conventions.