Assessing and Teaching Writing at Storm Lake Elementary School

                                        

     Our staff is implementing a writing assessment this year in grades K-4.   Several staff members have attended the statewide PWIM initiative and have learned how to administer writing probes and score them to determine student strengths in writing and student needs.  We have also learned strategies such as Talk Alouds and Composing Think Alouds which enable us to model for students well-written texts.

     At a staff development session on January 13th,  our teachers scored  mid-year writing prompts and compared them to fall writing samples to determine growth and continued needs of our students.  We will continue to work hard to help our students learn about the components of great descriptive paragraphs -  great titles, introductory sentences, meaningful sentences with pertinent details, and concluding sentences.  In addition,  we will ensure that our teaching ties to the Iowa Core Curriculum. We will strive to teach all of the necessary skills related to grammar and mechanics that students need to clearly convey messages in writing.  We will also help students use and understand parts of speech, similies, metaphors, and analogies in their writing as appropriate, and we will strive to integrate technology into written work whenever possible. 

Parents are encouraged to ask teachers to see fall and winter writing probes, and discuss ways to support writing development at home.  It is a skill we all need to be successful in the 21st Century!