The Star Wars Writing Process

 

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The last few days during our interim practice SBAC exams, I took the afternoons to focus on giving some practical life advice and informational writing structures to my students. We began by reading the article entitled, 10 Things We Learned from Star Wars, and having a class discussion about these particular life lessons. Next we continued by creating a hand plan by using the strategies by Wilda Storm:

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The beauty of the hand plan is that it is easy to remember and accessible for students to use as a tool when it comes to writing any form of essay. We continued our writing process the following day by introducing the concepts of establishing the 4 E’s (Evidence, Explanation, Example, and Elaboration) after writing the introduction and conclusion. img_3659

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Please leave a comment on the blogs of my students, and continue to encourage them as writers. Many of them haven’t been pushed this much, and I’m attempting to balance the “force” of how much they can handle as I see them grow. May the force be with you! – Mr. Garcia

Supporting Reading at Home

Parents, it’s important to support your child’s reading at home and while I can share many different strategies, I want to focus on this specific one when your child is reading a magazine, article, newspaper, or anything else they make come across. The following is something that I found on “6 Techniques for Building Reading Skills—in Any Subject” by Susan Barber

Teach Close Reading Skills

Guide students in annotation by directing them to do more than highlight or underline. Encourage students to have a conversation with the text by jotting notes on the text while reading—this keeps students engaged and often increases comprehension. Annotations can include:

  • Defining new words
  • Asking questions
  • Coding recurring words and themes
  • Making personal connections to the text
  • Citing current events
  • Highlighting heading and subheadings
  • Summarizing paragraphs
  • Chunking
  • Categorizing information
  • Numbering and ordering
  • Drawing pictures

The list of possibilities is endless—the point is to have students form their own process when approaching a text. But don’t be afraid to give students specific annotation guidelines such as “annotate the writer’s characterization techniques” or “find examples of . . .” to help them focus. Annotations also help students identify which strategies work best for them as they try to process and understand information. The clip (belows) “Girls Read Comic” from The Big Bang Theory is a great way to introduce the concept of reading closely and its importance.

Encouraging Failure!

I would like to share my thoughts on why failure is important. I’ll be sharing how failure is embraced within our classroom, yet also how important it is for the growth of our students. Reading the article “Embracing Failure: Building a Growth Mindset Through the Arts” it revealed that we don’t normally encourage our students to learn from their mistakes. Often times we want to see perfection immediately, rather than finding the “entry point” of where they are at with whatever academic subject. A lot of support that parents can do is to have full on conversations that make their child think of what went wrong and what they could do to make it better. I’d like to echo the techniques in embracing this from the Edutopia article:

  1. Teach Your Kids That It’s OK to Make Mistakes
    • Hearing the words that it’s okay to make a mistake will release the tension and pressure for failure. In all reality, encouraging your kids to make mistakes on something they’ve never tried will allow them want to take more risks. There is nothing like the comfort of knowing that the support system at home will be well received when they know that failure will not define who they are.
  2. Teach Your Kids to Take Risks
    • Taking risks allows opportunities for life lessons and even new ways to solve problems. Don’t just limit this to academics, but rather let this be the outlook on life. Ask your kids, “what risks have you taken this week that will help you become a better person?”
  3. Teach Your Kids to Appreciate Feedback
    • I remember as a child that it wasn’t so much the feedback that was given to me that would shut me down, rather it was how the feedback was communicated. Always be sure to encourage them in a setting that will allow them to feel secure and safe, and never upset or intimidated on what you’re sharing with them. This will allow them to be open to receiving and then giving feedback.
  4. Teach Your Kids How to Provide Critical Feedback
    • When giving feedback to your kids and encouraging them to do the same, teach them the sandwich method. “Praise, truth, and praise!” An example could be, “Sebastian, I love how you completed the five paragraphs that were required, however look at capitalizing all the nouns that are needed in your writing…however, it’s still a great start to what you’re completing.”
  5. Give Your Kids Opportunities to Provide Critical Feedback
    • One of the ways I love to encourage this is give students an opportunity to share their thoughts on this blog, as well as share what their peers could be improving on. That’s the purpose of this blog, to write and encourage each other to become better writers. At home start with something simple, “How did you like dinner…and be honest? Too much salt or not enough?” Feedback can be as simple as that when as your kids to give you support.

These are just little pieces of advice in allowing my students and your kids to grow as a whole, while becoming the best they can be for our future tomorrow!

Mr. Garcia