25 Days of Classrooms: Simple to Complex

This month I am sharing stories from

classrooms in Berwyn South District 100.

Day 10: Simple to Complex Sentences with Joe Schueller (2nd at Piper)

     

     This week, I had the opportunity to attend the #IRCBilingual17 conference and one of the sessions I went to was on Sentence Composition.  It was presented by Renee Urbanski, and she spoke about how she had taken hundreds of student writing samples and analyzed them to find the reason for a gap students had between their ACCESS reading and writing scores.  She discovered that the difference seemed to lie in the definition of a complex sentence.  Students were producing a lot of simple sentences, and needed some guidance on how to craft a more complex one.  It wasn't that they couldn't produce it, but more that they didn't think to produce more complex sentences while writing. She talked about using Response Frames (Kinsella) that embedded grammar in them, rather than just Sentence Starters, to increase complexity in more guided writing opportunities.  

     The very next day, I walked into Joe Schueller's 2nd grade class, and found them writing.  Sonia Peralta, the EL teacher, and Colleen Noffisinger, the Literacy Coach, were also in there, walking around as the students were writing.  I stopped and talked to a student about their writing, because it was about nutcrackers (and I love nutcrackers).  Then I realized that everyone was writing about something they wanted for Christmas.  I looked around the room and noticed this on the SMART Board.

    I think I see a Response Frame with a conditional sentence that has a past perfect clause!  This is what Renee Urbanski talked about the day before!  

    It turns out, Joe's class had finished their nonfiction writing the day before, and his team hadn't.  So, they decided to use the time to use a Response Frame around a common topic (Christmas) to focus on increasing the complexity of their language when writing.  They could have just had the students write about Christmas, but instead turned it into a language lesson.  Excellent choice!

     I also caught Joe reading a student writing sample to the class.  He had walked around the room, and purposely chose a sample that demonstrated accurate transfer of the Response Frame to their writing.  Using student samples as examples in an excellent way to make they feel like real writers!

     Thanks, Joe, Sonia, and Colleen, for letting me pop into the lesson and see writing in action. Thank you for your thoughtful planning on developing our young writers.  Lessons like this placed intentionally, either after units or within writing workshop to increase their awareness of the structure of language within their genre they are writing, would be a wonderful way to continue this work.  :)