Have you experienced this….
You’ve taught your students the different genres of writing, focused on the elements of each genre, practiced writing multiple essays within each genre, and then when it’s time for them to take a standardized writing test, you look at their computer screens and
When i taught middle school ELA we had to give a state writing test every year and that was definitely my face upon seeing what my students were writing. We had spent months—MONTHS!!- learning and practicing how to write each genre. I mean from brainstorming to organizing our ideas to writing a first draft and then a final draft…and then come the day of the test and all of that went out the window! Not only did that all fly out the window, but my students weren’t writing the assigned genre, they weren’t writing about the assigned topic, they weren’t even writing in paragraphs!
One major shift I made in my writing instruction was spending time focused on just decoding writing prompts. I’d give my students a prompt and we’d practice close reading it, similarly to close reading a text or passage. We’d follow these general steps:
1. Read the prompt all the way through without marking anything.
2. Read the prompt again and highlight the genre.
3. Re-read the prompt and highlight or circle the topic.
4. We’d make a t-chart and write the genre and topic on the left side.
5. Re-read the prompt and underline what needs to be included (a main idea, information from both sources, transitions, multiple paragraphs, etc).
6. List the information from Step 5 onto the right side of the t-chart.
This one activity was SO powerful for my students, both in middle school teacher and now as an upper elementary teacher! They focused in on what the prompt was specifically telling them to do and created their own checklist to guide their planning and writing. I saw my students’ performance on standardized writing tests, including the performance task on SBAC (or PARCC in some states), grow a ton as a result.
You can easily implement this in your classroom today. Give your students a writing prompt and take them through the 6 steps and then have a conversation with your class. How does close reading the writing prompt help them prepare to do the actual writing task?
If you want to get started right away, but don’t have time to come up with multiple writing prompts, I’ve got you covered! I have a set of writing prompts that you can use with your students immediately. Each set (2nd-3rd grades, 4th-5th grades, and 6th-8th grades) comes with 15 unique writing prompts, as well as a mini, guided recording sheet to focus their attention to each component of the task.
Click on any of the images below to go to my TPT store. :)
