Explore Quick Write Examples
Katie Burrows
Created on January 11, 2022
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Transcript
Quick Write Examples!
Let's Explore
START
What is the focus of the lesson?
Student Response - Respond to Ideas
Pick a Lesson Sample
Student Response -
Genre Study -
Topic - Modern Social Issues
Genre Study - About the Author
The Goal
The Texts
The Process
Student Responses
What is the focus of the lesson?
The Goal
The Goal
About the Author
- It's a short project - takes only a few days, & isn't overwhelming for students.
- It's novel - students haven't written these a lot, if at all.
- It's a good get-to-know you piece that allows students to show personality without asking for too much vulnerability.
- It's a good task to assess where students are at with various basic writing skills.
- It's the perfect project to introduce students to the idea of using mentor text to craft better writing.
- Students immediately begin applying the "author" label to themselves - builds self-concept!
The Texts
Jason Reynolds
About the Author
Lemony Snicket
Elizabeth Acevedo
Deborah Giles
I picked this Jason Reynolds 'About the Author' because he's a popular author that students are often familiar with from their independent reading, but also because there are elements of personality and voice to notice and discuss with students.
Lemony Snicket is always a favorite for his uniquely dark, mysterious, and sometimes sarcastic tone. His 'About the Author' is another excellent example of unique, interesting, and slightly absurd voice.
I picked Elizabeth Acevedo's 'About the Author' for a few reasons. First, this one has a slightly different style than the others in that it focuses more on listing Acevedo's accomplishments- a structural element that I know will be easier (and safer) for some students to emulate. I also chose Acevedo because we will focus on her poetry later in the year, and the book this ATA is from (The Poet X) is a book club option later in the year as well.
I chose this 'About the Author' from Deborah Wiles because it reads more like a mini-autobiography. Instead of simply listing accomplishments like Elizabeth Acevedo, glossing over details like Lemony Snicket, or avoiding them entirely like Jason Reynolds, Wiles includes lots of smaller details about her life that the younger readers of her books can relate to and that connect to the historical fiction genre in which she writes. Basically, it's a strong combination of both personal facts and unique voice so students see it's possible to blend the two together!
The Process
About the Author
After students complete an "emulate" quick write, which will become a first draft for some of them, students work with a partner to explore a handful of 'About the Author' mentor texts and draft a list of what they notice about this genre. We then discuss and generate a whole-class list, which I later combine with the relevant CCSS standard to create the rubric for the best draft students will eventually submit. This way, the rubric used to assess student writing incorporates standards, but also allows for student input based specifically on our shared observations of authentic pieces within the given genre.
Student Responses
About the Author
Writing Standard - W.8.3.b
The Goal
The Texts
The Process
Student Responses
What is the focus of the lesson?
The Goal
W.8.3.b
supposed to have some sort of description in their stories, but they didn't have much clue how to execute it beyond a very basic level. As a class, we turned to some experts with a goal of building a toolkit of descriptive and dialogue strategies to take our writing from elementary to extraordinary.
The Texts
Descriptive Writing -
W.8.3.b
Develop Characters -
Dialogue -
This mentor text was one I found from another teacher on the web, and it is the perfect passage to study several descriptive writing tools! Using only this short passage, we were able to discuss:
- Strong Adjectives
- Vivid Verbs
- Sound Words & Sensory Details
- Stretching Out a Single Moment
If you don't have time to explore a mentor text and/or quick write every day, it's useful to find texts like this where you can cover multiple writing skills. You could revisit a text like this over multiple days, rather than introducing new texts.
Character descriptions always seem to be a place where students struggle in narrative writing. Some students overwhelm us with every minute detail about a character when they're first introduced. Others tell barely anything, and we can't possibly imagine the character the student pictures in their head. Mostly, though, students give very boring and straightforward descriptions that haven't evolved from their elementary writing days. They need strong examples and good discussion to help their writing (and characters) move forward.
Dialogue is another area where students struggle to develop past clunky, awkward, stilted conversations in their writing. Even students who are stronger dialogue writers are usually not yet adept at giving their characters unique voices or speaking styles. So, we turn to Jason Reynolds, who is not only a master of developing interesting characters, but also giving them unique and realistic-sounding voices. The dialogue in Reynolds' stories helps these characters come to life, and this is something students can definitely learn to imitate in their own writing. This particular excerpt has the double bonus of a great character description we can discuss as well!
The Process
W.8.3.b
Student Responses
W.8.3.b
Topic - Modern Social Issues
The Goal
The Texts
Student Responses
What is the focus of the lesson?
The Goal
The Goal
Modern Social Issues
- Help students make modern-day connections to the topics and issues at the heart of the fight for civil rights in the 50s and 60s.
- Introduce students to a variety of voices, ideas, and perspectives to help students clarify and understand their own beliefs about the status and treatment of people with different identities in our society.
Unit Goals:
The Texts
The Danger of a Single Story
Why Are Muslims So...
Cash Me Ousside
Native Tongue & Stealing Bread
Modern Social Issues
My Name is Zainab & I am Not a Terrorist
Even More Texts!
This piece was, hands down, my students' favorite of the entire year. You want to see a class full of middle school boys get excited about a poem? Here it is.
For context, if you missed this when it happened a few years ago, "Cash me ousside, how bow dah?" is a reference to an episode of Dr. Phil in which a teenager became internet-famous because she had a very unusual accent and was generally a pretty awful person. In a move that even my students agreed is awful and totally unfair, she somehow landed a recording contract and was branded as "Bhad Bhabie," the name your students might know her by. I did not show the original Dr. Phil clip to students for obvious reasons, but when I asked "Is anyone familiar with the 'Cash me ousside' girl?" around 2/3 of the class was ready to drop the knowledge on us.
Students were pretty tickled that this girl was coming up in class at all, so they were already pretty excited about this slam poem, and then the poem itself blew them out of the water. Now that you have context for it, I'll leave you to enjoy! After watching and writing, we talked a lot about delivery and word choice, and the next day I asked students to pick a line they liked and try crafting their own poem.
This poem was one I found through YouTube, and while the performance and content were what made this piece a great fit for our unit, the other big reason I chose this poem is that the two girls performing it look about the same age as my students. There are tons of these "Youth Speaks" and "Brave New Voices" poems on YouTube performed by middle and high school students, and exposing your students to these videos helps show them that they aren't too young to write awesome pieces, and that poetry and great writing aren't exclusive to adult writers. There's also something powerful and intense about the brutal honesty of teenagers that comes across in this poem as well.
Content Warning: There is one use of the 'N' word in this video, in the context of the girls reciting slurs that have been directed at them and others of their ethnicity. When I showed this video to my own students, I downloaded it to my computer and used iMovie to cut the split-second of audio so students weren't exposed to it. If you are comfortable having pre-discussion about the use of the word with your students, you certainly don't have to cut it, but I did so at the request of my principal.
We started the Modern Social Issues Unit with a very popular TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is a longer talk (around 18 minutes), and the day my class of 8th graders viewed it we happened to be in the rather warm library sitting directly in the sun right after lunch. I printed out transcripts of the whole talk for each student so they could more easily follow along and keep notes about their thinking, but I still fretted that with the less-than-ideal teaching conditions they'd all be checked-out or asleep by minute five. To my great surprise, nearly every student sat through the whole talk with rapt attention. Adichie does a great job of breaking her talk up with a mix of personal stories that are often humorous, but the students were also drawn to her message about how dangerous it can be when we view something with only one perspective. This was the first piece we looked at because of how foundational it was to the entire unit, and nearly every student independently referenced this text in a quick write or book club discussion at some point during the unit. It gave us a nice overarching message to frame the rest of our discussions, and students had a much better grasp of what the unit was going to be about and what sorts of things we might discuss once we had watched this video. Here are the video and a link to the transcript!
Micah Bournes featured twice in our slam unit, and could have easily featured more. He has several excellent poems about the black male experience that made excellent additions to our discussions and writing about modern identity issues in America and the connections to the Civil Rights Movements study happening in humanities.
The first text, Native Tongue, was one I was introduced to at Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher's professional development session, and it was one of the 'gateway' poems that led to my growing obsession with this genre. It makes some really great points about how we value certain types of speech over others in our society, even though there is no logical reason for the difference in what we view as 'academic' speech and 'slang.'
The second Micah Bournes poem we looked at in this unit was Stealing Bread. This is a poem that students tend to have stronger opinions about, which is encouraged during this unit and translates into students' writing. I frequently remind students during this unit that their opinions are entirely their own, and as long as they back those opinions up with evidence and critical thinking, that's the important part. This is also another great text to talk about delivery. Bournes is an intense and expressive performer, and this exaggerated delivery makes it easy for students to identify how his voice changes throughout the poem.
This poem was another good one to talk about delivery, and is also a slightly less intense alternative to the Why Are Muslims So... poem if that one is too heavy for your students. My students enjoyed this one and most of them absolutely lost it at the line, "Honey, I'm hot all the time."
A collection of other texts I used during this unit for you to explore!
Excerpt 1 from Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
Excerpt 2 from Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
Most of the texts we explored during this unit had to do with race and ethnic identity, but there are many different aspects of our identities that could be explored with students. Here are some other texts you could use to discuss these other parts of identity in our society.
Gend-o-meter from Teaching Tolerance
What Do You Know?: Six to twelve-year-olds talk about gays and lesbians from Teaching Tolerance
Health - Teen authors urge boys to express their feelings from NewsELA
Girl in a Country Song by Maddie & Tae
Student Responses
Modern Social Issues
Student Responses
Modern Social Issues
Student Responses
Modern Social Issues
Response Type: Respond to Ideas
Example #1
Example #2
Example #3
In these responses, students respond to the ideas in the mentor text by providing their own opinions, considering moves they see the author making, or evaluating favorite lines or elements they felt did not work well.
Mentor Text
Student Responses
Student Example 1
Student Example 2
Student Example 3
Mentor Text
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Mentor Text
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Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Response Type: Emulate the Text
Example #1
Example #2
Example #3
Example #4
Example #5
Mentor Texts
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Mentor Text
From Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Student Response 3
Student Response 4
Mentor Text
Hip Hop Analogies by Tara Betts
Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Student Response 3
Mentor Text
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Mentor Text
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Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Student Response 3
Response Type: Write a Related Text
Example #1
Example #2
Example #3
Mentor Text
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Student Response 2
Student Response 3
Mentor Text
Content Warning: There is one bad word at the very beginning of the video- it's currently set up to skip that word, and I use a manually edited version of the video with my students.
Student Responses
Student Response 1
Mentor Text
Student Responses
Student Response 1