ND Curriculum Initiative

Subject & Standards

Needs Assessment/Rational

Data from the 2004 North Dakota Assessment, school improvement goal, personal observation, concerns from former students now attending college, and our reading series were the rationale for developing this unit. Results show our lowest language arts score was in Standard 5: Write for a variety of purposes. The benchmark is 2. Different purposes require different forms. One of our continuing school improvement goals is to improve our writing across the curriculum for all students. Our objective is to help all students become stronger writers since many college students expressed that writing was a very weak area for them in college. Consequently, we felt there was a need to work on our writing skills in all areas and grades. In my classroom, I have also noticed that when one mentions writing the students hit a mental block. I want this unit to make them feel comfortable in different aspects of writing. I will use the state standards as a guide for my activities to help my students see that writing in different forms can be productive and fun. This unit will help strengthen my students skills in writing areas that are set to our state standards. This will be in compliance with No Child Left Behind requirements that call for “continuous and substantial academic improvement for all students.”

Understandings & Goals

Enduring Understanding: I want my students to understand that writing can occur in many different forms such as paragraphs, poetry, compare/contrast diagrams, graphs, and promotional ads. The audience determines these types of writings.
Goal(s): 1. Students will understand there are many different types of writing and many purposes of writing in different areas of life. 2. Students will be able to differentiate between the different purposes of writing and when to use the different types.

Questions Answered

Essential questions: 1. What is a journey?  2. What were the different journeys the characters experienced in our book? 3. What are some different ways we could write to share about the journeys of our characters? 4. Where can we find information about the different subjects we are writing about?  5. What are some different types of writings that we read? 6.  What are some tools we could use to make writing fun and easier?
Objectives: 1. After discussion about the correct way of writing a paragraph using (introduction, topic sentence, details, and conclusion) the students will be able to write a paragraph using these components with minimal errors.  2. Given Haiku poems to research the students will be able to develop their own Haiku using 5-7-5 syllabication.  3. After discussion and research about promotional ads, the students working in groups will develop a promotional ad.  4. Given the opportunity to identify different methods of organizational writing tools, the students will be able to apply and utilize organizational methods of writing.  5. Given the right components students will be able to develop detailed booklets for family and peers.  6. Students will discuss and draw conclusions on how writing is used in different areas of learning.

Assessment

What quiz and test items e.g. simple content-focused questions that require a single, best answer) will provide evidence of understanding?  1. Since this is a project-based unit there are no formal tests or quizzes.  2. The students will hand in their projects upon completion.
What academic prompts e.g. open-ended questions or problems that require students to think critically and then to prepare a response / product / performance) will provide evidence of understanding?  1. In the writing assignments after each theme the students will discuss what type of writing prompts will be used such as; ads, paragraphs, diagrams, poems, and graphs.  2. They will then develop and complete the writing assignment.
What performance tasks and projects e.g. complex challenges that are authentic, mirror the real world and require a performance or product) will you include that will provide evidence of student understanding?  1. Students will create poems, paragraphs, ads, graphs, and Venn Diagrams.  2. The poems and paragraphs will be presented to different audiences.  3. The poems will be e-mailed to the web sight, Children’s Haiku Garden.  4. The Venn Diagram will be used to develop a compare/contrast paragraph.
What other evidence (e.g. observations, work samples, dialogues, student self-assessment) of understanding will you collect?  1. There will be classroom observations and individual discussions with students on their completed assignments.  2. After discussion, a rubic assessment created by the students will be used to determine a grade.  3. The compositions and poems will be made into booklets. 4. Documentation will be made on their final work.

Instructional Strategies

Students will use a combination of inquiry-based and problem-based learning to answer the question, “What are some different ways writing can be used in the learning process?”  Through the problem investigation students will discuss and record different types of writings that are used to inform, and entertain people of different audiences throughout life. Project-based learning will help students tie the unit together by showing them the different types of writing, tools used to create, and ways to inform different audiences. Their knowledge of writing will help them incorporate this into different subject areas as the need arises.