Lesson Plan (Cinquain Poem)

Teacher: Ruth Gonzalez Lopez
Theme: Cinquain Poem
Grade Level : Fourth Grade
Concept: Creative writing
Content Standards:

• listening/speaking
  
• reading
  
• writing

Grade Level Expectations: The student writes narrative, descriptive,and persuasive text demonstrating command of Standard English, using research and organizational strategies and the stages of the writing process.

Content Standard #3: Writing

The students communicate effectively to a variety of audiences in all forms of writing through the use of the writing process, proper grammar, and age-appropriate expressive vocabulary.

Strategy: Conceptualization

Thinking skill: Synthesis

Assessment technique: Celebrate the writing process by having the students read their poetry aloud with fluency, rhythm, and expression.

Objectives:

• Write a cinquain poem.
• Understand and identify differents parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
• Understand and use synonyms, and other parts of speech to write cinquain poem.

Materials:

• Worksheets
• Cinquain grafic organizer
• text book
• a writing rubric
• charts
• flash cards

Activities:

Initial

1. Greeting, date, weather, and song.
2. The teacher will review the syllable pattern in each poem with students and the meaning and function of the following terms: noun: names a person, place, or thing. verb: expresses action adjetives: describes a noun or pronoun, and synonym: means the same or almost the same thing as another word.
3. The teacher will discuss how cinquain poetry stresses the use of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in writing. Have students identify different needs of speech in the Father's Day poem and explain their function as follows: ( Father) - noun - describes the topic (active, strong) -adjectives - describe the topic; (fishes, cooks, plays) verbs- express an action. (God's gift to us) - expresses a feeling. -( Alex) refers to the title.

Development Activities

1. The teacher begins to discuss the first step in writing a Cinquain Poem and writes examples of cinquain poetry on the board or hand out a copy of the Cinquain grafic organizer.
2. Have students brainstorm possible topics about which to write. Subjects might include: words from a content area being studied; names of friends, family members and pets; a favorite hobby or any other topic of interest. Encourage students to name topics that can be easily described or that evoke feeling. Record students suggestions on the board.
3. Choose a topic from the generated list that you know students are familiar with and write it on the board.
4. Write line 1 on the board and invite students to name a noun that describes the topic. List suggestions in the Line 1 row. Continue by writing Line 2 on the board and asking students to name nouns that describes the topic. List their suggestions in the Line 2 row. Continue the process through Line 5.
5. Choose example from each row and write a model cinquain poem for the chosen topic on the board.
6. Have students write their own cinquain poem using the same topic. Encourage them to use a dictionary or thesaurus to find synonyms that might be more interesting and concise.
7. Have students write a cinquain poem using the worksheets.

Closing Activities:

1. Students will work in groups to write their cinquain poem.
2. Each group will present their works to the teacher to be corrected.
3. The student will share their work with others and then display Cinquain poems in the classroom bulletin board.

Homework: Have students write a cinquain poem on a topic that is the opposite of the one they have already written. For example, if they choe to write about their father, than have them write about their mother.

Metacognition: What did you learn today?

Lesson Plan (Arthur Writes a Story)

Teacher: Ruth Gonzalez Lopez

Story: Arthur Writes a Story

Author: Marc Brown

Theme: Something Special

Grade Level: Fourth Grade

Concept: Creative Writing

Content Standards:

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing

Grade Level Expectation: The student writes narrative, descriptive,exposiory and persuasive text demostrating command of Standard English, using research and organizational strategies, and the stages of the writing process.

Content Sandard #3: The student communicates effectively to a variety of audiences in all forms of writing through the use of writing process, proper grammar and age apropriate expresive vocabulary.

Strategy: Conceptualization

Thinking Skill: Synthesis

Assesment Thecnique: Comic Strips

Objetive: After finishing reading the story "Authur Writes a Story" the student will be able to:

• Answer questions from the story with the five W's and how.
• Identify the story elements in a short story.
• Write a narrative story of something importatnt to you. The story should have character, setting and a plot.

Materials:

• reproduced material
• textbook
• chart
• six- frame comic strips format
• a writing rubric
• flash cards
• sentence strips

Activities:

1. Initial:

• Grettings, date, weather, song
• The teacher will revew the character, setting and plot of the story.
• The teacher will encourage the students to write there answers in complete sentences.

2. Development Activities:

• The teacher begins to read the story while the students follow along and take turns reading aloud.
• The teacher will stop reading to ask questions of comprehension using the 5 W's and how.
• After finishhed the reading the student will be asked to choose a flashcard with some details from the story. They will identify the character, setting and plot of the story and glue them under the corresponding column of the board headed: Character, Setting, Plot.
• The teacher will hand in six frames comic strips to the students in which they will use to create a story. They should include charcters, setting and plot.

3. Closing Activities

• The students will work in groups to write their story.
• Each group will present their works to the teacher to be corrected.
• The students will share there work with others then display their comic strips in the classroom bulletin board.

Homework: Identify the parts of the story by filling in the bubble with the correct answer.

Metacognition What did you learn today?

Benefits of Low Stakes Writing (Writing to Learn)

This article shares some benefits of low stakes writing. According to Peter Elbow, low stakes writing helps students be active learners. Their writing performance is also much livelier, clearer and interesting. This is due to the fact that their writing assignments are not graded and as a result, their level of anxiety is decreased and their motivation is increased. As ESL teachers, I believe that we need to consider and understand these advantages of low stake writing in order to help our students develop their writing skills. I also consider that by maintaining the students' high interest we will see significant results in their writing .

Using Writing in Disiplinary Subject - Matter Courses by: Peter Elbow

This article provides the two purposes for teaching writing: write to demonstrate learning and write to learn. The first, is the most popular used and is a high stake writing always counted as a part of the final grade. The second, write to learn, is less popular in the classroom and is of low
stake. Peter Elbow points out that low stake wiriting help students understand and remember the subject matter of a course. As a ESL teacher, I partiularly believe that writing to learn is the
best to use with our students because it's less stressful and easier on both teachers and students.
I found Peter Elbow's suggestios of different kinds of writing very helpful, useful. He also emphasizes that when students understand that they are being asked for two very different kinds of writing in the course, their writing will improve because of their extensive practice. I think that if we are constantly seeking for our student progress then we should provide them with alot of practice, keeping in mind that practice makes perfect. In addition to this, our students need us to guide them with a lot of patience through this slow writing process which may take up more time than what we expect.

A Proposal for a Taxonomy of ESL Writing Strategies

This article reviews four theories related to ESL writing instruction approaches so as to provide a theoretical format for the classification of ESL writing strategies. Considering the theories of contrastive rhetoric, cognitive development, communication and social constructionism, this study proposes five categories used to ESL writing strageties. A taxonomy of ESL writing strageties is then established based on synnthesizing studies on ESL writing strageties. The five writing stategies are: communicative, rhetorical, metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective. Almost all of the categories of writing strategies in the studies are used to categorise the writing process.

As an ESL teacher, I consider that the development of writing is very complicated and influenced by many factors. However, the social constructionism theory and social/affective writing strategy called my attention because I am a constuctionism teacher. We assume that "writing is primarily a social act". Social/affective strategies are defined as strategies that writers use to interact with the target discourse community for the support and to regulate their emotions, motivation, and attitude in the writing (Carson & Longhini, 2002). Once again, it is in our hands to motivate students to write by guiding, supporting and providing them the opportunities to write. Keep in mind that the motivation to learn to write effectively comes through you!

Tecnologia ou Metodologia?

Reflexion on the video Metodologia ou Tecnolgia

Although this video is not in English or Spanish it's message is very evident. I think that there's a lot more to do than simply presenting a lesson in a methodolgically way. It's just wonderful to have all the advanced equipment in our schools, but what use do they have if the teacher doesn't know how to use them effectively. As teachers we must take advantage of the wide input of technology that surrounds our students. We definitely need to change our old methods and begin with the new by focusing on the importance of motivating our students with their likes and needs. Eventually, our students will enjoy the learning process.