Dear 7A, You all are making great progress learning how to make inferences while reading. When we first started this skill, a little more than half of you could accurately make inferences. Now all of you have shown improvement and can make inferences with little to no hints from me.
And so begins my letter to my group of 7th graders after they turned in their assignment on making inferences. The letter goes on to explain what areas in which they are still struggling (making inferences is not the same as stating opinions, for example) and what the class’s next steps will be (continued guided practice).
Their attention as I read aloud the projected letter is palpable.
The class likes to see where they are as a whole group and they can see what trends their work exhibits. Their eagerness to get their individual assignments back crackles in the air. You better believe they read all the comments I wrote because they want to see how they showed up in the class letter.
Do I do this for EVERY assignment? Absolutely not.
Do I this at least one per unit or skill? Yep!
However, sometimes I don’t the time time (or energy!) to craft letters to each class, so instead I create a word cloud. Remember when they were all the rage? Well, this is a throwback!
My 7th graders write an essay on the topic, What does it mean to be human? After their first attempt at answering this question, I pulled out the key words from their papers and put them into a word cloud generator. The result showed the class which words (and therefore which concepts) were the most common.
Before handing back their essays with my comments, I displayed the word cloud and had them make observations. Then when they received their individual work, they could see where their ideas fit into the word cloud and thus into the class community’s understanding of what it means to be human.
I hope you try writing a class letter and/or creating a word cloud at least once this year. I think you will be pleased with how the students react and respond.
As always, email me with any questions, teacher problems, or if you just need to share something magical that happened in your class!
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