The third grade English Language Arts PARCC on-line assessment is over for this year. For the most part, after a shocking first day, it was better than expected. We knew months ago students would have three tests; the literary analysis, the research simulation, and the narrative, all of which were combined reading and writing tasks.
As teachers, we clued in quickly to some striking nuances and rallied. For example who would tell third grade kiddos to write an essay in a 1 inch by 6 inch text box…not us, but, yes this did result in more than a few one sentence essays. And, this strange little disconnect from our classroom instruction and practice prompted me to wonder how best to address this problem. Wonderings are just a wonderful thing…turns out, I had already built a writing prompt with a video link, that provided kiddos with a regular sized word doc, with many of the same tools, and the added capability for students to submit their writing to the teacher on-line, and for the teacher to return the writing, with comments, back to the student. This is is all possible through our district’s Discovery Education, and a super easy to use tool called the Writing Prompt Builder…
This is an example of a writing prompt our 4th grade team used for our yearlong writing prompt project in 2012.
Student could watch the link, write, and submit their work directly to their teacher for feedback and rubric notes.
This is an example of a writing prompt the PEARSON team put together for millions of dollars and is using in the current PARCC test to assess student achievement of the COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS…
So there you have it…the writing prompt and writing area from our friends at PEARSON, and a teacher created writing prompt complete with submit to teacher and teacher feedback capabilities. This formative assessment is part of our day to day teaching and learning cycle… Again, the teacher created writing work was created in Discovery Education using the Writing Prompt Builder. It takes maybe 10 minutes to build and assign.
I am happy to help and answer any questions my fellow teachers may have, and to PEARSON, I say, do better.
patrice sutton on education... 