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The Week That Was

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Subjects

  • Arts & Humanities
    --Language Arts
  • Educational Technology

Grade

  • K-2
  • 3-5
  • 6-8
  • 9-12

Brief Description

A weekly writing assignment results in a year-end volume of work that documents students’ writing progress.

Objectives

Students

  • complete a weekly writing assignment that demonstrates their writing skills.
  • develop a volume of work during the school year that documents their writing progress.

Keywords

writing, journal

Materials Needed

  • pen or pencil and paper
  • computer with word processing program (optional)

Lesson Plan

This activity can be done from time to time, or it might be a weekly activity (perhaps a homework activity) that lasts all year long. If you use this as a yearlong activity, you might save the work students do each week and bind it into a special keepsake book to present to them at the end of the year. That bound volume will serve as proof of students' improvement in writing skills over the year.

The activity is a simple one
Each week, students write a paragraph (older students might write more) titled, for example, The Week That Was: September 12-16, 2005. Students might write about something special that happened during the week, something they learned, something they did, something that a parent did, something they want to remember You can give students free range for topic choice, or you might assign a topic for writing.

Additional Thoughts and Resources

  • Read about one teacher's experience with a similar writing assignment in A Week in hte Life of..., an Education World "Teacher Feature" article about teacher Penny Lowe.
  • Do you have writing standards your students must achieve at your grade level? Use this activity as a benchmark for showing student growth toward meeting those standards.
  • Assign this weekly writing as a homework assignment.
  • Students might do this activity in handwriting at home. Then, as a weekly computer center activity, have students type the activity onto a disk that is kept at school. That way, you have easy access to their yearlong writing when you compose the end-of-year volume of their work.
  • You might relate each weekly writing assignment to a particular skill you are teaching in the classroom. For example, one week students might be required to include three adjectives in their writing, the next week they might need to include a quotation (with proper use of quotation marks) in their written entry
  • You might involve parents as proofreaders of the weekly assignment.
  • If you're looking for writing topics or prompts for your students, you might use Education World's Writing Bugs or Quotation a Day resources.

    Assessment

    If you use this assignment occasionally, assess students’ work based on whether or not they met grade-level writing standards. If you use this assignment as a yearlong activity, the bound volume will serve as documentation of students’ writing growth.

    Lesson Plan Source

    EducationWorld.com

    Submitted By

    Gary Hopkins

    National Standards 

    LANGUAGE ARTS: English
    GRADES K - 12
    NL-ENG.K-12.7 Evaluating Data
    NL-ENG.K-12.12 Applying Language Skills

    See more Lesson Plans of the Day in our Lesson Plan of the Day Archive. (There you can search for lessons by subject too.) For additional language arts/reading lesson plans, see these Education World resources:

  • Lesson Planning: Language Arts
  • Language and Literature Subject Center
  • Teacher-Submitted Lesson Plans: Arts & Humanities
  • News for Kids
  • The Reading Room
  • Writing Bug
  • Every-Day Edits
  • Work Sheets from Teacher Created Materials: Language Arts  

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    Updated 07/19/2010



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