S16: Blog 12: In My Opinion...

The past month or so, we’ve been doing a lot of practice on opinion writing in preparation for this week. This past week we did an ELA module where the performance task was writing an opinion piece to answer a question. This question was, “In your opinion, is space travel safe or dangerous?”

I spend more mornings than afternoons in my classroom so I am able to teach a lot of reading, something with which I have become very comfortable. Typically, I will pull our four Tier 3 students and teach them the reading lesson while my CT teaches it to the rest of the class. This parallel teaching has allowed us to be able to give all of our students, but especially the Tier 3 kids, the support that they need. Back at my table we’re allowed to move at a little bit of a slower pace, do a little more out-loud reading, and spend a lot more time answering scaffolded questions to achieve the goals that some of our students would be able to achieve practically on their own. It also helps to ensure that they are more focused, because with a 4:1 ratio, I’m not going to miss very much.

I was pretty excited to learn that we’d be reading chapters from a short book about space travel for this module. I grew up on the Space Coast, maybe 25 minutes from Cape Canaveral. We used to stand outside our front door to watch the shuttles take off and while my parents don’t work at the space center, many people we know did and still do. I’ve been on multiple fieldtrips to a local planetarium, the Kennedy Space Center, and the Astronaut Hall of Fame. This allowed me to bring a load of extra background knowledge to the table to help my kids, who have grown up on the other Florida coast, to better understand what was being read.

Building bridges to help students understand is so important. Especially since we were dealing with some very content-specific vocabulary in this module. I found that the visuals provided in the book were a great place to begin. Labelled diagrams showed the kids what flight and space suits looked like and what all the different parts of them were. It allowed us to discuss why they were important. We talked about how the helmet on a space suit, is similar to a helmet you’d wear when you were riding your bike. They both are going a long way to protect your brain; and the space helmet provides the added bonus of allowing you to breathe! There were other words like “layers” and “pressure” for which I was able to provide more physical examples. When we talked about what the word layers meant, I had them look at the clothes we were wearing. I was able to show them that we often wear layered clothing, as I was by wearing a tank top underneath my blouse. One of my students was then able to make the connection by pointing out that she had a t-shirt on underneath her hoodie. For pressure, I held out my arm and asked my students to give it a squeeze, thus demonstrating to them that that is what pressure is. The pressure they put on my arm didn’t hurt me, but the pressure astronauts feel (g-force) during takeoff could be heavy and dangerous.

Writing can be a struggle for these students, so I was pleased that the way the module was organized really helped them build up to writing their final opinion piece. Throughout the past week, we not only completed a graphic organizer where students found text evidence for both “safe” things about space travel and “dangerous” things about space travel, but also had them re-read the text before they wrote today to quickly text-code and find any previously missed details. I found it amusing that two of my students decided to write about space travel being safe while the other two decided to write about it being dangerous. In my opinion, the book was heavily influencing the students to pick safe. I feel that many of the details in the text were meant to explicitly tell students about safety features and that the students would have to be able to think critically to realize that those safety features could malfunction and lead to danger.

I like opinion writing and I think my students do too. It’s funny to me though how I find myself having to turn off a large portion of my brain when working with them on their writing. I took far too many AP-like classes in high school where we had to argue both sides of the story or of history. However, back here in elementary school we pick a side and we stick to it tenaciously. Also, I like that I am able to teach my students how to follow a rubric that will guarantee them some amount of success. We’ve been focusing a lot lately on having students assess their own writing in preparation for this module. Today, the rubric we put up on the board was no surprise and they were able to follow what it said about an intro sentence, five or more examples, a conclusion sentence, and using correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

I haven’t gotten the chance to look over my Tier 3 students’ work in detail but I know that every single one of them started with “In my opinion,” wrote almost the whole page, and had some version of an ending sentence. I have a feeling that when I look over their work I’ll see these areas as their strengths and discover areas on which we need to spend more time, like paraphrasing. This week though, was certainly a victory for them, in my humble opinion.

Addresses FEAPS 1 b and d and 3 c, e, and h

#EDE4942 #FEAPS3C #FEAPS3E #FEAPS3H #FEAPS1B #FEAPS1D #opinionwriting