Writing+Analysis



The purpose of this assessment was to analyze children's writing to gain a better understanding of their literacy skills. Generally this assessment will be an ongoing process because children are writing every day in their writing workshop, reading workshop, and even in their morning work. Story prompts are great to give to your students allowing them to use their creativity but also assess how they are using different literacy skills learned during writing workshop. This assessment most importantly tells the teacher how well the student can develop sentences with good grammar, punctuation, and even understanding the different parts of a sentence.
 * Purpose of this Assessment **

Shiyona is an entertaining and creative kindergartener from Cambridge Elementary School. She is always exciting about the work she produces throughout the day and when given the opportunity to share with the class she is more then happy to get up in front of the class to read any story she wrote. She always appreciates any feedback given from the teacher and will often give a compliment back because she always loves when she can make the teacher smile. Shiyona will also admire any work that the teacher shows the class, which sometime will hinder her creativity when completing a writing activity.
 * Introduction to the Child and Setting **

The methodology behind this writing analysis was based off a readers/writers workshop that I taught throughout the week. The lesson began with the book, __ Red Sings from Treetops __, which is about an angular character in a crown and robes that enters into different seasons with her dog, who is also wearing a crown. Moving through spring to summer to fall and winter, they interact with different aspects that each season provides and the changing shades, and roles, of colors as they go. This book is read through poetry and is combined with artwork to capture the story. After reading the story the activity was modeled so students had a good understanding of what they were expected to complete.
 * Methodology **

Shiyona was very enthusiastic about this assignment because she was really intrigued by the illustrations in the story. I explained to Shiyona that good readers are not only able to understand the text but they are also able to understand the illustrations and how they are connected to the text. After Shiyona finished her writing prompt and picture she quickly walked over to me so I could see all the work she has done. As I explained previously, Shiyona loves to make the teacher happy so when looking at her work I noticed similarities between the teacher model and her work. Shiyona was still able to develop her own creative thoughts but she was blocked by the example shown. On her writing prompt she wrote: "My favorite season is Spring. I like this season because my birthday is in January. During this season I like to fly my kite." As you can see, the words is wrote in the prompt does not correspond to each other because January is not in Spring. Her performance was influenced from the teachers’ prompt that said: "My favorite season is Spring. I like this season because my birthday is in March. During this season I like to fly my kite." As the teacher that taught this lesson, I am going to use these findings to improve the results of the lesson and the assessment of this individual student.
 * Description of findings **

Overall, Shiyona has a good understanding of how to compose a sentence and punctuation in a sentence but the model given after the reading influenced her. If I were to give this lesson again I would only explain my expectations of the activity and then when they are finished with the writing activity I would have everyone share what they wrote and as the teacher I would share my own example. By showing students the teacher model after they already finished the prompt it lets them think creatively by thinking of what they know about different seasons, but also thinking back to the book about what they saw or heard. Then when I share the teacher model it could inspire them to show their favorite season another way.
 * How to use these findings **