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Quick Write Examples!

Topic - Modern Social Issues

Writing Standard - W.9-10.3.b

Genre Study - About the Author

Student Response - Write a Related Text

Student Response - Emulate Text

Pick a Lesson Sample

Student Response - Respond to Ideas

What is the focus of the lesson?

What is the focus of the lesson?

Student Responses

The Process

The Texts

The Goal

Genre Study - About the Author

The goal is that by the end of the week, students have crafted a short (1-2 paragraph) About the Author piece that is original and attempts to show a unique voice or personality. The secondary goal is that students begin to understand how we can use mentor texts as models to learn from and improve our writing.

• 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!

For the first writing project of the school year, I ask students to craft an "About the Author" autobiographical piece. There are a few reasons we start the year with this project:

About the Author

The Goal

The Goal

Deborah Giles

Elizabeth Acevedo

Lemony Snicket

Another reason an "About the Author" piece is great to begin the year with is it's easy on you! Because literally every published novel has an 'About the Author' section, there are infinite mentor texts to choose from. If you find out that students like certain authors, try to bring in ATAs from them. Choose ATAs from authors you like or authors you'll explore in class throughout the year. Most importantly, select authors whose ATAs show strong personality and unique writing voice. Aim for variety, so students can see multiple approaches. Here are some of the mentor texts I've used to introduce this genre of writing:

About the Author

Jason Reynolds

The Texts

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.

About the Author

The Process

About the Author

Student Responses

What is the focus of the lesson?

Student Responses

The Process

The Texts

The Goal

Writing Standard - 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.

While working through a narrative fiction unit, it was obvious that CCSS standard W.8.3.b was one my students struggled with. Their writing lacked appropriate and engaging description. Dialogue was either all over the place or non-existant and was often punctuated incorrectly. Character descriptions were elementary at best, and I died a little inside every time I read a new variation of, "She was 16 years old with brown hair and brown eyes and was an average girl." Clearly, my students could tell that they were

W.8.3.b

The Goal

Dialogue -Excerpt from "Look Both Ways" by J. Reynolds

Develop Characters -Excerpts from "Look Homeward, Angel" by T. Wolfe & "The Golden Compass" by P. Pullman

W.8.3.b

Descriptive Writing -Excerpt from "If I Stay" by G. Forman

The Texts

Generally, these lessons all followed a similar pattern: Students read and listened to the new mentor text, then immediately did a quick write. Students were strongly encouraged to try and emulate the mentor text using characters and details from their own stories, but students were largely given freedom in how they approached their quick writes. After the quick write and some sharing time, we discussed as a class what we noticed happening in the quick write, and I filled in any gaps toward the end of the discussion regarding elements of descriptive writing I wanted students to notice. During this discussion, we kept notes in real-time by annotating our copies of the mentor text. After the discussion and mini-lesson portion, I asked students to pick one descriptive or dialogue skill we'd discussed in the lesson and either write a new portion of their narrative or revise a current portion to practice and apply the skill.

W.8.3.b

The Process

W.8.3.b

Student Responses

What is the focus of the lesson?

Student Responses

The Texts

The Goal

Topic - Modern Social Issues

Unit Goals:

• 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.

Modern Social Issues

Ultimately, students will craft a literary analysis essay with multiple sources based on our quick writes, book club readings and discussions, and whole-class discussions. We also explore language as a form of protest, and we look at how protest songs, slam poetry, opinion pieces, and even protest art can be used as a means of advocating for change in the face of unfairness. Students greatly enjoy the opportunity to confront modern issues that they've been hearing about online or in the news but have never been given a chance to learn about or confront!

The modern social issues unit is a book club-centric unit designed to correspond with the study of Civil Rights in 8th-grade humanities.

The Goal

The Goal

Even More Texts!

My Name is Zainab & I am Not a Terrorist

Modern Social Issues

Native Tongue & Stealing Bread

Cash Me Ousside

Why Are Muslims So...

The Danger of a Single Story

The Texts

Next

Modern Social Issues

Student Responses

Back

Next

Modern Social Issues

Student Responses

Back

Modern Social Issues

Student Responses

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.

Example #3

Example #2

Example #1

Response Type: Respond to Ideas

These quick write responses emulate the style or craft of the original mentor text; shape poems, figurative language, and other structural elements can be observed as students play with words.

Example #5

Example #4

Example #3

Example #2

Example #1

Response Type: Emulate the Text

In these responses, students wrote a piece that didn't necessarily directly emulate the mentor text, but was inspired by the content and may have borrowed a line or two from the original.

Example #3

Example #2

Example #1

Response Type: Write a Related Text