Assessing Students Writing

One important thing that I learned is that you cannot tell what student's writing is the best by how neat it is. That is not what is important. What is important is the content of the story. I also learned that it is important to evaluate students writing samples so that you can figure out what you need to work on with that child or a group of children. I found the worksheet that we did in class to be very helpful because it let me understand how to evaulate students writing. I learned about punctuation, organization, the stages of spelling, and so much more. I did not know that there were so many different ways to evaulate spelling. I think that by learning this material it will help me to become a more knowledgeable teacher because I will be able to help students progress in their writing abilities.

In Tuesday experience they are working on writing their first stories. The teacher gave them a scenario that they foun a 100 dollar bill and they needed to find out who it belongs to. While I was there she had the students share their stories or what they had already wrote. I was so surprised to hear what the students came up with. There were some very interesting stories. Also, the students knew about puncuation and capitalization from the morning messege and from posters around the room. In the morning messege the teacher does not put in puncuation nor does she capitalize the beginning of the sentence. She asks the students if they can figure out what is wrong with the line and then they come up to the white board and correct it. Also, if a letter needs to be capitalized they put three lines under it and then capitalize it. I found this to be very interesting. She has also talked about having a beginning, middle, and end in their story. She read them a story and had them tell her where the beginning, middle, and end of the story is, and how to put in little problems and solve them. I thought that was a great way for students to learn about putting a beginning, middle, and end into their stories.

Now that I know more about assessing students writing I can look more in depth at the students writing during Tuesday Experience. I believe this will help me in my own classroom because it will give me the knowledge to know what to work on with my students.