One way that students become stronger writers is by reading what others write, and so that is what we did. ![]() However, I utilized the remaining time the second day for peer review. My students needed an additional 15 minutes the following day to complete their paragraphs. In all honesty, I thought this process would take one class period from start to finish, and it did not. Then, I walked around and actively monitored their progress. To help encourage every student to participate actively, I provided my students with ways they could help their table groups. While I think this would have been better in groups of 2-4, it did work with larger groups. ![]() They sit in tables of either five or six students. My students worked together in their table groups for this assignment. For a theme-based literary analysis paragraph, students connect the theme back to society today. This quote was a subsequent event from the story that showed the theme fully-developed. Like above, students introduced the quote in green, wrote the quote in blue, and provided the MLA parenthetical citation in red. For commentary writing, I don't allow my students to include the word "quote." It's a tough habit to break, but they can manage it with practice. Students wrote their commentary that explained the quote and analyzed how the event connected to the purpose of the paragraph in black. This quote was the first event from the story in which they felt the theme emerged. Students introduced the quote in green, wrote the quote in blue, and provided the MLA parenthetical citation in red. For the topic sentence, my students needed to include the GTAP: genre, title, author, purpose (of the paragraph -in this case, the purpose was to show how Bradbury developed the theme). Paragraph Color-Coding Instructions Sentence 1: Topic Sentence I even color-coded it to show my students exactly how I wanted them to color-code their paragraphs. I wrote out explicit directions for the collaborative paragraph assignment on my whiteboard. ![]() Not only did they need to include these various elements in their paragraphs, but they also needed to color-code them to show me that they understood the aspects.įor the paragraph, students analyzed how Ray Bradbury developed the theme in his short story "The Veldt." This is a prompt that comes straight from the standards, and students needed to identify how the theme emerged, and how Bradbury fully developed it by the end of the story. This was my way to get students actively thinking about every single paragraph element. ![]() So, I decided to have my students color-code each element of the paragraph. It was still early in the school year, and I was still working on writing instruction with my students -primarily on how to properly embed quotes and write thoughtful commentary. And to be completely honest, that is why I switched up my sophomores' recent short story paragraph about "The Veldt." I was already behind on grading various writing assignments, and so I decided a collaborative paragraph was the way to go.Īs I switched gears from an individual Jane Schaffer literary analysis paragraph to a collaborative paragraph, I thought about how I could make the activity even more beneficial for my students. In the post, one of the benefits included less grading. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the benefits of assigning a collaborative writing assignment in the high school English and middle school ELA classroom.
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