Writing Analysis

This last week I got to work on writing with my students.  Their assignment was to create a creature, brought about from the book they are reading, and to write at least five details about it.  The students I worked with thought up some amazing creations, and had a lot of fun writing them.  For example, one of my students created a stub person who can shape shift, do magic and live in Wyoming (I had to laugh when I read where he lived because it was so random!).  Another student created a falcon that changes size based on whether they smell something clean or stinky.  I was incredibly impressed with everything they were thinking up as well as how motivated they were to write about them.

When it comes to talking about their writing, many of these students wrote with lots of detail.  They have been working on adding adjectives and more detail to their sentences in class, so I focused this assignment on this.  They wrote a lot about what their stub people could do, where they lived, and their appearance.  I expected these would be the topics they would write about, but they really surprised me in the amount of detail some of them added.   

Another thing that surprised me was the flexibility these students had. They were coming into roadblocks when it came to spelling, and they didn’t get frustrated by words they couldn’t spell.  Any time a student couldn’t spell a word, and asked me how it was spelled, I redirected them to other ways they could find how to spell it.  They started asking each other how to spell words, they looked through book, and then began helping each other look in the dictionary that I provided for them.  I observed this happen throughout their work time, and was impressed at how quickly they stopped asking me to get an answer; but used other resources to figure it on their own.

These students worked so hard on their writing, and it definitely shows.  I think they had a lot more ideas that they shared through conversation with their peers and me that they didn’t write down.  At first, I was worried by this.  When I began to see the difference between what they were discussing and what they wrote down, I thought they were just avoiding the assignment or something along those lines.  After thinking about it, I decided that wasn't the case.  I realized that even though they were doing more talking than writing, they were still learning through their discussion.  They discussed ideas and details, and asked for help when needed.  Even though they didn’t write down everything they discussed with their peers, it still shows that they learned through their responses to each other, and how they worked through the assignment. 

I thought this writing assignment went really well with these students, and they have begun to ask if they can create more.  This is really exciting for me, since I was a little worried about how they would take this assignment on.  I'm definitely going to keep this in mind when creating new assignments for these students!