Hello fellow Texas teachers! It is impossible to predict the prompt that your fourth and seventh-grade students will be given for STAAR this year. The key is to expose students to as many situations as possible, but none of us have time to write an essay for every prompt we can think of. So don't worry if you missed a prompt or ran out of time to write another piece. Students will benefit by brainstorming for different topics and quickly sorting main ideas using your expository summarizing frameworks . * Remember the number of main ideas can fluctuate depending on the student and topic.
Today, I reviewed with the fourth grade classes by exposing them to a topic and developing a plan using their frameworks. I started the lesson by spreading out my topic posters and reading the topic aloud for each poster that I had created. Next, I scattered stars with the main idea blurbs already written them on the floor around the room. Each student chose one MI blurb to go and find the topic that it belonged to and place it on the poster. Some posters ended up with main ideas that fit better with a different topic, so as a class we walked through each topic and the main idea blurbs and discussed the best placement for them. In this 30 minute lesson, each class was exposed to 8 prompts and frameworks with main ideas.
Here are a few samples from today! Be sure to check back to see where we go from here!
Main Idea Blurb Stars
Why is it important to be part of a team? Write about an object that is important to you.
Why is it important to have rules? What is your favorite place?
