Exemplar ELA Lesson - Hook Your Readers
During this lesson, students were at the point in their small story narrative unit where we entered the revising stage. Students were taught to revisit their story beginning and work on revising it to add more description that will interest and hook their readers. Feedback and revisions show work from the whole unit in which students were asked to revisit their writing to add more, specific kinds of details. Based on my rubric evaluations, the class seemed to demonstrate an overall understanding of the unit this lesson was based within. The majority of the class placed in between first and second or at second grade on the rubric for most categories, including their hook/lead. Though some students needed more prompting than others, most students were able to try and apply the taught skills and add more description while revising their stories independently. Students who displayed more struggles may have had difficulty deciding what exact details they were missing or what may hook their readers.
Evaluation Criteria
To the left is the rubric that guided my scoring of students' beginning and other aspects of their narrative writing. Linked is a copy of the student's narrative checklist. The goal students looked to on their writer's checklist related to what I used to evaluate their work. Since they had access to the checklist, it felt fair to grade them on what they had knowingly worked towards.
Provided Examples
To the left are examples that were included and hung up in the classroom for students to reference. To the right is an example that was worked on in front of students to demonstrate how to revise and revise specifically a narrative beginning.
Student Work Samples
Examples of student work after working on revisions
Focus Student #1
This student represents the highest writers in the class. This work sample shows the student's application of the
lesson by incorporating onomatopoeia in their hook. This student was able to apply this and many other skills independently and my work with them was to challenge them. I pushed this student to make revisions that omitted rather than just added. We practiced working with some figurative language to include stronger details. Feedback is shown that challenged the writers description and some spelling.
Focus Student #2
This student represents the on-grade level students within the class. They were able to use the focus lesson to demonstrate a lead that incorporated setting. Overall this student was able to apply some aspects taught independently but required some teacher assistance to stretch their understanding. The feedback provided to this student helped them to see where they may add more detail but not what exactly to add.
Focus Student #3
This student represents the struggling writers of the classroom who are writing below grade level. Their beginning incorporates some of what was taught but is lacking details and required prompting. This is a continuing trend throughout their piece as feedback shows they needed continued assistance to add appropriate details often enough. This student needed more help working on independence with understanding and applying skills taught as they needed guidance to complete each rubric skill.