Friday, 25 May 2018

Friday afternoon 25 May      Year 10 Social Studies      Amazon Rainforest 

A feature of the Writing Plan for 2018 is a teaching strategy which ensures students are Talking About the Texts they are required to write. In Judged Group Writing Tasks students work in small groups on a set writing task.

Usually, students are asked to draft a paragraph, one which is similar to the assessment task. An exemplar is used to model the requirements of the writing task. The teacher may want students to focus on sentence starter use, grammatical features such as modality or content details and vocabulary chains.

Prior analysis of student exemplars from 2017 indicated that students who did not reach the standard did not use all sentence starters. Students also tended to include two or more subjects in a paragraph without linking them in a significant manner.

The sentence starters were:  The Amazon rainforest is culturally significant because....
                                                .....it is significant because.....
                                                the problems are........

Because each student group is required to draft a paragraph which is then presented and judged, students begin to Talk About the Text.
As there is a competitive element to this strategy, student involvement increases dramatically. Students who are reluctant writers or hoha often change overnight and enthusiastically participate,  correcting the work of the peers.

This strategy requires the teacher to judge, dialogue and then grade the work of each group. e.g. "I'm going to give this paragraph a 4/5 because it has .........." This is an exciting way for students to work on a writing task and to contribute without feeling whakama. i.e. students can spread the mahi.

One drawback of this method is the need to set deadlines during the lesson, for writing the draft and for the student presentation of their paragraph. This is needed so there is time for the teacher grading of each text. This means there is a class discussion about the quality of each text or talk about the text. In this lesson, it was a little rushed but it is still possible to give relevant feedback which can be discussed during the next class.


-good use of the sentence prompts x3
-good topic/vocabulary chains
e.g.   rainforest, traditions and spiritual
        home
e.g.   rainforest, animals and cutting trees
        and building roads
-but the paragraph tries to explain two different topics,
the two halves are not linked  
-the two halves could be linked by explaining the
traditions which the indigenous people use to limit
their hunting of various animals
-vocabulary examples which could improve this
paragraph are: indigenous people, in the past
animals have been protected, and, the habitat of
many animals are now threatened because the trees
are being logged.




-good use of the sentence prompts x2
-good topic/vocabulary chains
e.g.   rainforest, indigenous tribes,
        ancestors, history
e.g.   rainforest, smaller, weather,
        government and global warming
- the two halves of the paragraph are linked
 by the word smaller, the rainforest is
 getting smaller, but the link is not strong
-to improve the link add details which show that
the place they live, the rainforest is the place where
they get their food, their clothing and where they
build their shelters.





-good use of the sentence prompts x2
-good topic/vocabulary chains
e.g.   rainforest, indigenous people, tribes,
        a specific way of life
e.g.   rainforest, a certain way, their
        necessities, food, clothing
-the two halves of the paragraph are linked through
the use of, their specific way of life and their
necessities
-to improve the link add details about using the
rainforest to hunt or collect food or collect material to
make shelters.
To improve fluency link sentences using, because,
this is because, in addition, besides




















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