One Term To Go

After a lovely two week break (hello sleep and relaxation and lots of reading) I'm geared up for our last term of the year. Term 4 is an interesting one, report cards, lead up to Christmas and all the awards etc that come with that, and then the joy of finding new classes and classrooms for 2010. So within all that madness, I should plan a nice calm term without a lot of excitement, right?

Wrong!

November is NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don't know about NaNoWriMo, it's National (actually international) Novel Writing Month, where a whole bunch of crazy people try to write 50 000 words in 30 days. I did it way back in 2003 and 2004, but real life kept getting in the way in November and I've been unable to do it since. That part of real life is no longer, and I am back. But this time I'm draging my students along with me. The Young Writers Program, associated with NaNoWriMo allows me to set this up in my classroom. Students set their own word count goals (they recommend between 5000 and 10 000 for Year 5 and between 6000 and 12 000 for Yr 6) and then set out to write their own novel in 30 days.

The website has some good ideas for teaching NaNoWriMo (though sometimes you have to look for it a little) and I'm pretty excited, because my students love nothing more than a challenge. I'm intending to have a kick off and finishing celebration, and we may also have some special events throughout the month (breakfast writing, come on down). Throughout October we'll do a series of lessons leading up to it, and then come November - writing time.

Along with continuing Reader's Workshop and going on with our unit it should be a fun term :)

Things I'm doing well - Writer's Workshop

At the moment, I'm taking a bit of time to reflect on where I want to improve and what I'm doing well. You can find the master list of reflections here.

Writer's Workshop

It’s funny how much easier it is to be critical when reflecting than being positive. But one thing which has worked really well in my classroom this year has been the implementation of a writer’s workshop. The premise of it is pretty simple – students are able to write anything they like. Each session begins with a mini-lesson covering grammar, spelling, writing skills, genre etc. During writing time we have small group and one on one conferences.

There have been some awesome results including a whole heap of published work (which gets entered in the school writer’s club), a movie, and real advancement in the student’s writing. The students really enjoy the autonomy, and are getting really good at identifying where a piece should be improved.

There have been some glitches. NAPLAN ended up taking a lot of time which would have been better spent on writing. We haven’t been as consistent with some things as I would like, which is more of an organisational issue. And I’m still learning about it, which means I’m constantly making improvements. But, all in all it’s a lot of fun and there are some great results.


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NAPLAN Day 1: Language Conventions and Writing

Yesterday was the first day of NAPLAN, Australia's national testing. It's only the second year this test has been in practice and we're still trying to get our heads around some of it. There are many, many issues with the testing regime (like the fact it's based on an unwritten national curriculum) but alas, our Yr 3, 5 and 7s had to be tested anyway.

I supervised my 10 Grade 5s as well as my next door neighbour's Grade 7s (16 kids in all). There were two tests yesterday, one today and one tomorrow (the 7s have an extra test tomorrow) With a quick look, I think my kids did all right.

Language Conventions
This test is basically spelling, grammar and punctuation. The spelling seems to be designed to utterly freeze the children. They are given misspelt words in sentetences/diagrams and asked to find them (sometimes they are circled) and fix the spelling. For a poor speller, this is terrifying and it's the first thing you see in the test. For a good speller it's confusing - once you see the misspelt word you start to second guess your own knowledge. I had one student who I told to skip this section and come back to it, but she still burst into tears when there was only 5 minutes left and she had 3 words to go. (Nothing worse than a 10 year old in tears over a national test)

The Grammar and Punctuation for the Year 5s was good, although there was one format they didn't have last year and didn't warn us about. In places it was a little simple for my students, and I think they've done well, though I want to continue to work on different tenses. The Year 7 was was a definate kick up from the Year 5s, so I'm going to have to keep working hard on the Year 6s for next years test.

Writing

The writing test requires students to write a narrative based on a stimulus. Last year the stimulus was 'Found' with a number of story ideas and good pictures. This year it was one picture and barely any ideas and the stimulus was 'The Box' - rather abstract. All my students wrote in paragraphs and had almost interesting beginnings (a few began with dialogue which was great). Not as sure how they'll do, as I didn't have time to read them all.


Bribes

Our school had a low completion rate last year, so this year we're bribing them with jelly beans - 1 for every completed test (and a page of writing in the writing test.) One of the year 7s wrote his page yesterday, put his hand up and asked "do I have to write more?"

"Yes!" I told him. "Finish your story"

So he wrote another paragraph or two and collected his jelly bean . . .

Preparing for NAPLAN: The NAPLAN Game Show

NAPLAN (Australia's national testing for Year 3,5,7 and 9) begins on Tuesday, so I took advantage of a clear day yesterday to set up a game show in preparation. The class was broken into 2 teams, with equal numbers of 5s and 6s since the 6s had sport later in the afternoon. All activities corresponded with a section of the NAPLAN test.

Round One: Writing Ideas in 5 minutes. Each group was given the same writing stimulus and had to come up with as many story ideas as possible in 5 minutes. Points given for most ideas and most original ideas.

Round Two: Three parts to one story. There were 12 students in each team, so four of them wrote story beginnings, four wrote story middles and four wrote story endings. Then they had to put them together to make four different stories. They were only allowed 5 minutes to talk to each other before they started. Points for best story and funniest story.

Round Three: Spelling Relay. The NAPLAN spelling test requires students to find the mispelt word in a sentence and fix it. The relay had the students lining up in their teams running forward to one of the two easles and fixing the mispelt word, and running back to the next student. Points for fastest and for each correct word.

Round Four: Kung Fu Puncuation Kung-Fu Off: Students correct a poorly punctuated grammatically incorrect sentence by 'acting out' the sentence using Kung Fu Punctuation (must explain that some time). Points for correct corrections and for style.

Round Five: Team Maths Competition: Students work in a team to complete an old practice test. Points for fastest and for each correct problem.

Round Six: Comprehension Quiz Show: Students read a comprehension text and participate in a quiz show style event.


It was a fabulous day which really relaxed some of the students about taking this test next week and was just, down right fun.

5 things I hope my Year 5s will remember for next week's writing test

1. PARAGRAPHS! I don't want them to annoy the markers before they even start reading - if the sight of a page full of unbroken text makes my heart sink, think what it will do to someone who's spent days in a hard plastic chair reading bad writing.

2. Full stops and commas. Hopefully this will come in during their 5 minutes editing time. We're doing a short run on sentence lesson tomorrow.

3. Interesting starts. If I read 'once there was . . . ' one more time, I may have to eat their paper.

4. Showing not telling. One of my darlings actually wrote a fake street address rather than describing the house. It's like all descriptive words disappear when they hit test conditions.

5. Varied vocabulary. Call it the cult of 'nice', but for some reason students continue to use 'fun', 'nice' 'tall' . . .

And what I hope they keep for next week:

Their lovely creative stories. Where else am I going to read about Hovering Airconditioners or Memory sticks which come to life??