11/7 Quiz & Intro to the Writing Process

On Friday, Nov. 7, students took their first quiz of the quarter on the lessons covered in the first week of school:

• Dynamic Characters: main characters in a story; experiences changes throughout the story.
  
• Static Characters: minor or background characters; they don't experience a lot of changes throughout the story.
  
• Mood: feeling or emotions a reader gets from the story. The mood can be conveyed by the setting as well.
  
• Setting: time, culture, historical period, and place in which the events of a story, poem or play take place
  
• Theme: meaning, moral, message or overarching main idea of a story
• Characterization: process of developing characters in your writing
• Character Traits: attributes or distinguishing characteristics that define a character in a story.
  
• Inference: judgment or conclusion made from evidence presented and prior knowledge
• Metaphors: One thing that representing another; a symbol. Examples of metaphors: Love is a bee. | Their opinions will eventually collide. | Rug rat | Couch Potato | That joke is old.
• Simile: Two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as Examples of similes: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

We then started our lesson on the writing process (from a great website called http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/ela/writing01.html)
Step One: Prewrite

• Learning the Prewriting Stage
• Getting ready stage (Tompkins, 2000). This is the time for students to decide on a topic, and to gather and organize their ideas. Donald Murray (1982) suggests that 70% or more of the time for writing should be spent in pre-writing activities. For young writers, this phase is often centred upon a picture that students draw before they write. Older and more experienced writers consider and use a variety of prompts and frameworks to generate and organize their ideas. Some students may wish to explore their ideas through drafting, particularly those who are comfortable with writing as an exploratory process.

Step Two: Compose

• Students and refine their ideas in a composition. Students are "encouraged to get their words and ideas on paper and attempt to spell whatever words they want to use" (Stice, Bertrand, & Bertrand, 1995, p. 216). Students often write on every other line of their papers and conventions such as sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are not stressed during this phase.

Step Three: Evaluate, Revise, Edit

• Gives students an opportunity to take a second look. It is important that teachers understand the wide range of writing activity that falls within the general topic of revising. In some cases, revising might mean beginning a whole new draft, especially if writing the first draft has led the student in a new direction or given the student a new idea. In other cases, revising can mean refining the content, the organization (cut and paste), word choice, and sentence structure. It is important to teach students how to revise. They also can share their work with others and invite classmates to ask questions about the parts they want to know more about (e.g., What kind of cat was it?).
• You may need to go through this step several times before moving to Step 4, the Publishing stage.
  

Step Four: Publish

• Writing is presented in the final format.
• Focus, content, organization, style, and conventions have been addressed somewhere in the previous four stages, and in the final copy. All of the characteristics should be evident in the final copy. This final copy should be clean and correct. Few errors, if any, should appear excerpted from this website.