A lesson adapted from Isoke Titilayo Nia's "Units of Study in the Writing Workshop.
Primary Voices August 1999: 3 – 11.
When teaching any genre to students, it is very important that students be immersed in the genre itself. The following steps will help guide you through this process.
Read or share several grade-appropriate examples of the genre being studied with your students. Make sure each example focuses on the qualities of the genre you want them to see in their own writing. You don't even have to tell them the genre; just immerse them in the different editorials, articles, speeches, or letters.
After they have experienced a variety of examples, have students go out and find different kinds of writing that they think fits the kind of reading you've been doing (still not named). Have them bring in those pieces and put them in a basket, box, or folder for class examination.
From the pieces you've read to them, have them help you come up with a list of characteristics and features that apply to the genre being studied. They could do this as a whole-class or small-group activity.
With those characteristics in full view of the class, have students go through the basket of pieces and separate the ones that fit from the ones that don't. This is to help them understand and internalize the genre before they begin writing their own pieces. They should be able to tell you why some fit and some don't. Another basket can hold the ones that do accurately reflect the genre being studied.
Have several "mentor texts" on hand, texts that reflect something about them and that they might want to write about. Make sure to gather texts for different hobbies, backgrounds, familial structures, genders, experiences, etc.
Provide a "touchstone text," one that exemplifies what you'd want them to include in their work. This should be carefully chosen to reflect all the characteristics of your genre.
Read the text. If possible, have copies for all students to see.
On first reading, have students look for the author's purpose and audience. Have them support their opinion of the purpose and audience with details the author has chosen to develop the piece.
Here you might do a piece of the pie activity, having them come up with topics or ideas that they are interested in which would fit into the chosen genre. They might list people they'd be interested in writing letters to, controversial topics that fuel their emotions for an editorial, interesting ideas for features, etc. Have them begin to work with these ideas in a draft. Note that, although on-demand does not require content knowledge, this might be the place where you have students do research to deepen the idea development of their piece.
As the kids finish their first draft, go back to the piece to look at how the touchstone text develops ideas. Have kids find different ways the author develops ideas in his/her piece and discuss the effectiveness of the methods. Then have them look in their own pieces for places where idea development is weak, incorporating some of the touchstone's methods in their own.
Look at the text for other lessons your students need to understand the genre fully. For example, look for effective leads, transitional elements, closings, use of text features, etc. After each mini-lesson, students will apply to their own work what they have seen in the touchstone.
Take a page to see what it might have looked like before editing. Let students pick different words that the author might have chosen in an earlier edition and discuss why the author made the choice he/she did.
Look at the format of the piece, the use of headlines, graphics, etc. to have students apply to their own work.
Do this procedure over several days' time; then, after each mini-lesson, let kids go back to their own work to revise accordingly.
Hopefully, over this time, students will not only internalize the qualities of the touchstone itself, but also be able to apply those qualities to their own work, creating their own individual touchstones that they'll remember during the on-demand assessment.
Suggestions For Best Practice With On-Demand Preparation At The Primary Level
On-demand preparation at the primary level is actually all about instruction, not practice, just as in any other type of writing. Merely assigning on-demand prompts will not achieve the results you want. The following strategies will help you build a foundation for good writing necessary for your students to score well on the on-demand assessment.
At the entry level and early primary years, teachers may or may not want to give actual on-demand writing instruction. The decision needs to be based on how developmentally appropriate the task is for the child.
Good writing instruction at the early levels will be the foundation for all writing. Practice does not replace good instruction at any level.
Even the emergent writer can begin to understand purpose and audience. Through questioning, sharing, listening, synthesizing group answers, teachers lead students into discussions of why writing is important, why we write, to whom we write. At this early stage, the emergent writer may be communicating by drawing, cutting pictures from magazines, or just expressing orally as opposed to the written form.
Students at very early stages can begin to understand form. Even at the early stages of literacy, children can be exposed to different kids of materials in your classroom that later will reflect the demands of the assessment.
As students grow in their literacy, the classroom can begin to reflect more whole group language experience. The teacher of the primary classroom provides guided practice as she or he leads the students through a whole-group response to the prompt.
Gradually, the scaffold the teacher has built in the guided instruction session is removed. As students become more proficient as a group, the teacher can gradually turn over the process to the students. The last piece to be taken away is the planning to write (prewriting), since this part of the process can pose the most difficulty for students.
Modeling for students, guiding practice, giving emphasis to the necessity of prewriting and how it is done, and providing specific feedback that allows students to rewrite to proficiency during the practice sessions is needed. Students need to see their proficient writing to know what proficient writing looks like. This writing is the result of instruction and analysis of the work.