We are in the middle of several activities. Students are creating a photo challenge project, which involves finding pictures under particular categories and then writing about those pictures. We are also working on close readings of articles and writing article reflection essays. In addition to that, we are getting geared up for the end of course test by reviewing the technical vocabulary that they will need to learn. Lastly, students are reading nonfiction texts chosen during a book pass.
That is a lot going on at once. And it's the last week before spring break!
I have tried to scaffold the article reflection essays as best I can. We have read articles together to model annotating/marking up a text. I assigned articles related to their nonfiction text to push their thinking a little further. I wrote my own article reflection essay and we looked at it as a class, discussing what things the writer did while working on the essay. By doing that, we created sort of a recipe for the essay. With that recipe in hand and correctly annotated articles, they were set free.
While they wrote on their own, which they could only do through extensive scaffolding, I was able to hold conferences with each child on their project progress. We were able to talk one on one and they all got the attention they needed.
Sometimes, the chips just fall into place.
Sometimes, you get lucky.
