Kelly Hiatt: How can fifth grade students use a graphic organizer to aid them in writing a narrative piece with organization and ideas

[Kelly Hiatt]

Inspiring children to learn is what I love to do.  My classroom of 27 talkative fifth graders is set up into groups.  This is to help encourage teamwork and respect for eachother.  To add to this, the class rotates their groups every two weeks.  The students enjoy this due to the fact that they recieve an incentive if their group earns the most points.  However, my intentions is for the students  to work with everyone in the class.  I tell my students in the beginning of the year that we are a team and we work together.  Our classroom soon becomes a community " One for all and all for one"!  I feel that this is  an important part of learning.  It allows my students to feel safe and therefore they are not afraid to take risks and share what they have learned or know.

 

Our fifth grade compartmentalizes for readng and math, therefore I teach my homeroom students writing, social studies and science.  G.L.A.D is a new strategy that I learned last fall.  It is a great way to encourage students to learn.  Therefore I use many of its strategies to teach social studies and science.   As for writing, I meet with another fifth grade teacher every week.  I am blessed to be working with her because she is a writing consultant and also teaches twist camps in the summer.  With her expertise and our ability to work well together, we are able to create lesson plans for our students that encourage them to want to write.  We mostly focus on the writing traits, however we try to use creative ways to help the students learn new techniques for writing.  For example, we use lessons from writing fix and GLAD strategies.  My students also thoroughly enjoy sacred writing time like we do in class.  They are always asking to write in their journals during extra time.

 

As for Math and Reading, my classroom consists of 30 at grade level students.  Some of which are very challenging socially.  Math is taught whole class, and then I have the groups work together to practice the skill for the day.  During reading there is a lot more going on.  For the first half an hour of class I read a story aloud from the anthology.  After that the students are broken into three groups based on their reading level.  While I meet with a group to practice the reading skill and listen to their summaries, the other students are working independently.  Some are doing their spelling, some are working on their daily language review and the others are reading a book of their choice silently.  I don’t meet with the groups’ everyday so on the days we don’t meet the students are reading a leveled reader silently and writing a summary for a certain section.  They are also required to find three vocabulary words for each chunk to define and sketch.  For the last half hour of class three days a week, I have an intervention group.  During that time you will see students working on a novel as well as collecting information on it such as vocabulary, questions, summaries, and predictions.  This info is then shared whole class.

As for my classroom, I like to think that it promotes student learning as well as displays the new found student knowledge.  On the walls you can see the GLAD pictorials for the current lesson and strong verbs found and written by the students for the students.  There is also students work on display which is changed regularly on the walls outside the classroom door.  I am most proud of this because I learn so much about and from each of my students.  These pieces give me time to reflect on each student individually.

For my presentation I would like to focus on inquiry.  Specifically how can I design a graphic organizer that will aid 5^th graders to write a better paper with organization and ideas?  I have an idea where they funnel their ideas about what they want to write about based on a prompt.  Then once they figure out three things they want the reader to know about, they use a web to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why for each idea.  This is an organizer they can create themselves after practice in class.  My idea is to split my class into two groups with each group containing an equal amount of high, medium, and low writers based on their writing test scores so that it is data driven.  Then one group with be required to use my graphic organizer and the other group can use whatever form of prewriting they choose.  Then I will have the tests scored by a colleague.  I am going to look for a couple of things.  Does my graphic organizer really help the students when compared to their score?  Do any of the student s who can use any graphic organizer choose mine?  How many?  Last but not least, I am going to ask the class if they did or did not use the graphic organizer on their actual writing test and compare those results with their writing test scores.

 

 

[Julianne Dillard]

Hello, Kelly!

It was so nice getting to read about your busy class and the way the day is structured. That idea of shifting groups every two weeks is one I may try!

I am interested to see what you find with that graphic organizer experiment. Having the tests scored by a colleague is a thoughtful idea and will certainly lend some sense of "validity" to the results! :)

As I was reading your description of the organizer you are considering creating, I am really curious about the types of prompts the students will be working with. With the 5 w's emphasis, would the questions be looking for narrative responses? I'm trying to think of a good one to fit that model, but am stuck!

Graphic organizers seem like such a great tool. I'm glad you are exploring them and I'll be happy to see what you discover!

Julie