Blog Entry Two: My Students' Writing

The one writing project that I have been able to observe during my Fridays with the seventh graders is the 5 paragraph essay. I watched the teacher reiterate the form and process for writing the essay, which the students had already received a lesson on and taken notes on. They were off to work ahead on the weekend if they chose, or to work in the computer lab the following week. While I was there in the computer lab with them the following week, some students had made a lot of progress and had some writing to work with, while others hadn’t been getting much done at home and were basically starting out. So I was able to see the students using the My Access program at different levels of their project, which was interesting.

Three essays were assigned to the students to culminate their holocaust unit, and their teacher laid out the expectations for their work. They didn’t really need a rubric, because of the interactive my access program, which allows them to submit an essay, get a computerized score based on different areas of their writing, then improve their writing to the expectations of the computer program, and submit again. Yes, some children had done 19 submissions before I made it to them. Their teacher encouraged them to shoot for a computer grade of 5.5 out of six, and most students were working diligently with editing to reach that mark.

What I did notice about the program, however, was that students seemed to be tiring of resubmitting many times, because of spelling and grammatical errors. I suspect that some of the students may have avoided exploring the use of bigger words and longer sentence forms because of the fear of having to go back and resubmit again. I didn’t notice any students having significant issues with morphemes or spelling, more of them were struggling with rhetorical and stylistic issues. The students I have been observing are proficient and some are gifted students, so they are really exploring with ways that make their writing more impactful, coming up with catchy titles, and learning to research and cite sources.