Literacy Project 1: Writing Analysis and Lesson Plan

Overview

D (abbreviated for confidentiality) is an enthusiastic 4^th grade learner.  His passions are math and science, although he says he also enjoys reading mysteries and other stories that make him think.  An analysis of D’s writing and spelling follows.

Analysis

Meaning of the piece:

In the piece of writing I analyzed, the author is responding to a prompt about a talking pet.  Even though this writing was initiated via a prompt, it would appear from D’s enthusiasm that he enjoyed writing this piece.  D chose to write about a talking parrot because he loves birds.  He wanted to convey to the reader a sense of adventure and suspense through his development of the story and share his love and amazement of birds with the reader.

Six Traits:

Ideas:

In this piece of writing, the topic is fairly broad since it is a “bed-to-bed” story, spanning the length of one day.  However, you can definitely tell that the author has chosen this duration because of the nature of the prompt (one day with a talking pet).  The author did stay with his topic and only included main points and details related to his interactions with the talking pet, which makes the story focused, even though it deals with a broad topic. 

The author also does a consistent job providing details to support his main ideas.  For example, the author writes that he was walking too slowly for his pet parrot, so the parrot picked him up and flew him around to save time.  The rest of the story is filled with details chronicling the day’s adventures.

Organization:

One of D’s strongest elements in his writing is his organization.  He has a clear and provocative opening paragraph and a paragraph to conclude the story.  From the first sentence, the reader wants to hear what happens next.  D writes, “I was sleeping all cozy and warm, when I heard a noise under my bed.”  D takes his time to setup the characters and setting of the story in the first paragraph before transitioning to more action-oriented scenes in the body of the story. 

In conjunction with a solid introduction and conclusion, D makes an appropriate choice in paragraph breaks and structure to suit the purpose and audience of the story.  He uses transition words such as “finally” to make paragraph transitions smooth and chose to break the paragraphs at points related to shifts in time and content.  D’s organization makes the story flow well and very understandable.

Voice:

D takes a risk with his choice of voice, using a very conversation tone with phrases that D uses in his own daily conversations.  Through reading this piece, the reader can tell when D is annoyed, “I said no way Jose!” and when the D is yelling, “I said PUT ME DOWN”.  Through his voice, D reflects himself in his writing.  D chose to write in the first-person so that the reader can follow the author’s adventures with his talking parrot throughout the whole day. 

D provides personifying details about the parrot and includes many action-oriented descriptions that make the reader become engaged in the story.  D stays focused on the topic, chooses interesting details to include, and writes with his own natural and engaging language. 

Word Choice

Looking at D’s 1^st draft compared with his final draft, a reader can see that D attempted to insert colorful language to provide more vivid descriptions in the story.  However, although the word choice it at the right level, it sometimes seems out of place.  For example, D writes, “There we were at the cheerful kitchen.”  D added in “cheerful” to help us visualize the appearance of the kitchen, but this descriptive word seems out of place and perhaps unnecessary to enhance the story. 

In conjunction with D’s choice of voice, the word choice remains very basic and is full of conversational phrases.  For example, D writes, “He just drop me on my bottom hard”.  There are only a few fine moments where the author’s word choice enhances the story.  For instance, “My parrot refused me” gives the reader a clear image of the parrot being demanding and stubborn.

Sentence Fluency

While D consistently includes smooth transitions between paragraphs (see Organization) he does not always include transitional words that would assist the reader in knowing how sentences interrelate.  When reading his own story out loud, D’s verbal expressions helped the listener understand the sequence and flow of the story.  However, upon reading the story without D, the reader questions how some sentences relate.  For example, D writes, “When he [the parrot] was carring me I saw the stairs.  I thought there was no way he’d carry me down the stairs, and he didn’t.”  The sequence of events in this quote make sense.  However, the choice of sentence breaks and lack of transitions makes the meaning of the sentences difficult to understand.

In this narrative, D often uses the word “I” to begin sentences since the story is about all of the actions and feelings that he is experiencing.  However, he does use the occasional transition word such as “So”, “Then”, and “Finally”.   Through the revision process, it appears that D inserted some varied vocabulary to begin sentences, although most of his sentence beginnings remain repetitive.

Conventions

In this writing piece, D struggles with many errors in grammar that affect the meaning of his story.  Most commonly, D switches between the past and present tense and inserts unnecessary or omits necessary verbs for creation of a complete sentence.  Here are a few writing samples that demonstrate these errors:

“I scream!  I was afraid he is going to drop me…” 

“I decided that better get him some food soon.”  

“We headed toward the kitchen and that’s was my day began the day all animals could talk.”

From talking with D, it sounds like leaving off the “ed” at the end of words happens in speech and reading.  Thus, this error is carried into his writing.  In analyzing the symbiotic relationship between speech and written language, Cambourne writes about how the natural development of speech translates into written language (p. 28).  Thus, this relationship in literacy development may be the reason behind D’s grammatical errors.  If these verb errors are stemming from D’s speech, making the necessary changes so that his writing is grammatically correct will be very challenging.

In terms of punctuation, D consistently shows appropriate beginning and ending punctuation.  However, his comma and quotation usage are lacking or incorrect.  This sometimes affects the fluency and interpretation for a reader.  For example, D writes, “He [my parrot] was jumping on my face and said, get up.  It’s time for breakfast.”  In this example, the lack of quotation marks makes it hard to distinguish narration from dialogue.  However, with moderate editing, this text would read smoothly and be ready for publication.

Ownership of writing:

D shows that he has ownership of his writing in a few different ways.  First, he chose his own details to suit his interests, like a parrot and flying.  Also, he used his own voice and expressions to show that it was really him in the story.  D was proud to share his story with me as well as show me the illustration that he did to accompany his story.  He is very motivated to do his work, which includes spelling, writing, reading, and other subjects and is proud of his accomplishments, even if he doesn’t receive very high grades.  Finally, D is very willing to do a lot of revising before writing his final draft, which shows that he is able and willing to manipulate his work with a purpose.

Spelling Development:

It seems that D does not hear or speak words accurately all of the time.  It seems that this is impacting his spelling mostly by the fact that he often leaves off or unnecessarily adds suffixes to words (most frequently “ed”).  For example, he spelled fortunate “forchened” and confident “confinded”.  In his writing piece, he wrote “I was freak out!” even though the expression either requires an “ed” or “ing” at the end of “freak”.  Because this error remained unchanged between his rough and final drafts, I don’t think D knows that he is saying the expression incorrectly.  This kind of mispronunciation is extending itself to both spelling and reading other words as well as resulting in past- and present-tense grammatical issues. Templeton writes about spelling and the benefit of learning patterns within words to assist in spelling development (p. 104).  One skill that would help D improve his spelling is listening and looking for the patterns (specifically, ending patterns) in words.

Works Cited

Cambourne, B. (1988). An alternate view of learning. In The whole story: Natural learning and the acquisition of literacy in the classroom (pp. 28-42). New York, NY: Ashton Scholastic.

Templeton, S. & Morris, D. (1999). Questions teachers ask about spelling. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(1), 102-112.

Lesson Plan

Objective: Student will become aware of different verb tenses and understand how to write in the past and present tense.

Standards: EALR 3.3.5: Knows and applies writing conventions appropriate for the grade level.  For example, Grade 3: Uses consistent verb tense.

Materials: Pencil and Paper

Instructional Strategies:

Explain the objective of the lesson to the student.

Provide 2 sample paragraphs demonstrating use of the past and present tense when writing a narrative. 

Talk with the student about the differences they notice between the two passages.  Lead the student to some of the key patterns (such as “is” vs. “was” and suffixes such as “ing” and “ed”).

When the student is comfortable recognizing some of these patterns, direct the student to write a paragraph about something he did yesterday. 

Review the paragraph with the student, first having the student read the paragraph aloud, then asking questions to guide the student to make any revisions to verb tense so that everything is consistently in the past-tense. 

When the student is satisfied with his consistent use of the past-tense in his paragraph, direct him to write the same paragraph in the present-tense (as though he were doing yesterday’s activities right now).

Review the paragraph with the student, first having him read the paragraph aloud, then asking questions to guide him to make any necessary revisions.

Bring the lesson to a close by having the student verbally summarize for you the key points from today’s lesson.  Instruct the student to keep these two paragraphs as examples of the past and present tense for his reference.

Assessment: When reviewing this student’s future writing (formally or informally), look for consistent and proper use of the past or present tense.