Malala Unit Reflection

Hello O. L. Smith Community,

There were two major reflections I had during the Malala unit regarding students abilities thatI would like to share with you.

Many students struggle with answering multi-part questions. On both formative and summative assessments, they frequently answered the first part of the question, but did not address the second part. To combat this, I am going to begin by asking questions using the format 1a., 1b., 1c., so students are more readily able to see each part of the question. As students become more comfortable with answering each part, I will condense the format, slowly, until the multi-part questions are formatted similarly to those seen on standardized tests.

The other struggle I noticed was basic grammar conventions. Students were writing “i” and capitalizing the first letter of a word after a comma and not always capitalizing the word after a period. I will be re-working the conventions part of our 6+1 traits rubric to be more specific to addressing these points.

In order to help at home, please review any activities sent home with your child. Ask them if they answered each part of the question and ask them to point out their written answer for each portion of the question. Also, have them read their answers aloud to you. Then, look at their work and help them find the errors in their writing. These errors aren’t anything advanced, simply look for proper capitalizationand punctuation in each sentence. Any help from home simply reinforces the importance of learning these skills at school!

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to contact me!

Megan Timpf