Dear Parents: First 3 Weeks

The opening 3 weeks in ERW is meant to simply introduce students to the ways we work in this class, and the kinds of things we work on.  After the initial first three weeks of class, seniors in Mayfair's Expository Reading and Writing class have been exposed to the following learning activities:

• freewriting -- a great way to increase writing fluency
• annotation of texts -- an active reading technique where students write directly on text to track their understanding, their questions, the gaps in vocabulary, main ideas, interesting uses of language, evidence and support for arguments -- an essential college skill
• independent free reading -- in addition to academic reading, it is our goal to establish a reading habit, born of pleasure and curiosity.  Students are encouraged to choose books that they will enjoy and we spend our short Mondays with our noses stuck in a book. 
• minilessons -- short and potent lessons covering a singular aspect of either reading or writing
• they say/I say -- a series of sentence templates that help students to master the rhetorical "moves that matter" in academic writing.  These are small sentence starters to assist students engage directly with the words of others, summarize and paraphrase important points, and to negotiate a position between 100% agreement and 100% disagreement

In addition, I've tested the class to establish a baseline in reading comprehension.  The test measures college-reading readiness, and covered the following explicit skills:

• development and support
• finding meaning in context
• grammar, usage, and idiom
• identifying important ideas
• organization and coherence
• reasoning from text
• recognizing purpose and strategy
• sentence control and clarity
• understanding direct statements

After students took the test, they were able to review their tests to find what they got correct and what they missed, and most importantly, what skill was being tested on the questions they missed.  Students created a tally in each of the 9 areas, enabling them to see their own areas of strength and weakness. Among the 119 seniors that fill my 3 classes, scores ranged from 39/40 down to the low teens.

Finally, I polled my students by asking the following question:  Assuming nobody is "making you" read (like me), why do you read and what do you like to read? I am still compiling that data, so stay tuned here for some of their responses. 


That's it for now.  Keep checking back here from time to time.  I am going to do a better job this year of writing down what we are doing, and why we are doing it -- especially for these college bound seniors.

Next unit starts next Tuesday:  College Admission Essay Writing