Literary Essay

Literary Essay

We are just about to finish up our third writing unit from Teacher's College/Lucy Calkins, so I wanted to share how it went, what we did, what worked and what (definitely) did not work!

This quarter we focused on writing Literary Essays, which, before working my way through this unit, I could not have explained to anyone! So, since I wasn't 100% sure what a Literary Essay was and I knew my students weren't either, we started by just reading a bunch of sample essays and discussing what they were.

Our writing kit comes with access to several examples of Literary Essays written by students, so we read over a few of them and discussed our findings, and then I put together an anchor chart of all of the things we noticed (or that I wanted them to notice and they didn't).

For the first bend of this unit, instead of using an actual text, we watched the Panyee Football Club Video and used that as our "piece of literature". Although I think it was a bit confusing for them that we used a video in the first bend and then used text in the second bend, I do think that this was a nice way to start the unit because they didn't mind watching, re-watching, and analyzing bits of the video over and over again. 

After watching the video a few times, I asked them to look for common themes, lessons, character traits, etc... I emphasized that one way to come up with a claim is to pinpoint something in the text/video that you have seen before and we discussed how the characters worked hard like the characters in many different stories and movies, how people didn't believe in them at first which we see in a lot of stories, etc... Below is a list of all of the claims that we came up with:

After that, I had them pick a few claims and try out writing a thesis statement/lead/introduction (I'm trying to use all three terms so they know that they all mean the same thing). We used the graphic organizer below to do this and when students felt that they had one claim that they could write a strong thesis statement for, they chose that as the one that they would use to write the rest of their essay.

Once we all had our claims and thesis statements ready to go, we worked on collecting evidence from the video in order to create strong body paragraphs.

Finally, they wrote their own essays and I took home a stack of 36 papers ready to grade them all over the weekend. Unfortunately, however, when I started to read them, I noticed that more than half of both of my classes wrote summaries of the entire video instead of actual Literary Essays. They included quotes and plenty of details from the video, but they just did not seem to get that they were supposed to focus only on the parts of the video that supported their claim.

At that point I decided to create a checklist for writing a Literary Essay and I used it to score all of their essays. Before giving the essays back, I showed them the checklist and had them use it to grade two of the sample student essays that we had looked at at the beginning of the unit. 

 

 I think that seeing what I expected to be included in each section of the checklist as well as being able to read samples of text that included all of the necessary components really helped them to figure out what they needed to do. I gave them more time to edit and revise using the checklist and their second drafts were much better!

For the second bend, they were able to choose their texts and they completed most of the writing process on their own with guidance when needed or requested. I hung up the chart below and had them stick a sticky note with their name on it to whichever step they were on each day.

Our team agreed that the suggested texts for this bend were a little too long and complex for our students, so we decided on four short stories: (We just googled these titles and found PDFs of them online that we printed for the kids) 

Everything Will Be Okay by James Howe

Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting

The Marble Champ by Gary Soto

Birthday Box by Jane Yolen*

*Disclaimer: I cried when I read this one aloud to the class

We did have to go back and review transition words and when/how to use them in the middle of this bend, so I made this chart as a reference tool:

Now they are all typing up their essays and I will be grading them (hopefully) over spring break!

If you are interested in using any of my anchor charts and/or graphic organizers that I created for this unit you can grab them here!

Growing Words
I have not been doing the best job of keeping up with our Growing Words (a.k.a. Greek & Latin prefixes, root words, and suffixes) this quarter so this week we dove back in to that starting with the Root Words Aqua- and Hydr-, which both mean water.

On day 1 I introduced the root words using my little presentation that you can grab here.

And for the rest of the week they followed the routine that they are used to & used some worksheets that are included in that product to further explore those root words.

Guide Words

Last week I posted all about my Word Reference Materials unit which worked out really nicely for most of my kids, but I have a few who are really struggling with answering questions about guide words. They just can't seem to wrap their mind around the fact that they need to alphabetize and check if a word comes after the first guide word and before the second guide word. 

I've been trying to give them some strategies to tackle these questions like writing the alphabet at the top of their page, putting the words in between the guide words and checking the alphabetical order, etc... I even made them this little anchor chart to refer back to, which sadly got a little crumpled in the laminator.

Here is a digital copy in case you are interested in using it in your classroom!

We practiced using these strategies with a few questions in a presentation that you can grab for free below!