(Click image to download sample and feedback)
Grade 3 Informational Writing
Pool
Feedback for Improvement
Topic: Pool Fun
Main Idea #1: Swimming
Main Idea #2: Races
Main Idea #3: Marco Polo Game
What worked:
Feedback with Prescriptive Lesson:
CHOOSE a Focus Skill: What skill will make the biggest impact for this writer?
Main Ideas Sentences: The student needs to understand the value of rich language and varied sentence structure and with teacher direction, start to bring both to their main idea/reason sentences. In addition, using the Pick, List, Choose strategy for uncovering broad yet distinct main ideas would be useful when writing about this topic so the main ideas do not overlap in any way.
Elaboration: Student needs to use productive questions to elaborate details: What does it look like? Why is it important?
Introductions: This piece needs a strong lead and an effective topic sentence that names the specific main ideas in the author’s prewriting plan.
Conclusions: This student needs to write a strong conclusion paragraph that includes a restatement of the topic and main ideas using word variety to remind the reader what they learned in this informative piece.
This student obviously understands the structure of informational writing but needs direct instruction in main idea sentences, elaboration using detail generating questions, and introductions, conclusions. Whole class instruction where modeling is taking place will build rich vocabulary and provide this student with the confidence to take the skills learned to application.
Recommended Resources