The purpose of the Writing Month was to give students more opportunity for writing in order to improve their writing skills. The students at Spalding Academy do not have much experience with writing and complain when a writing assignment is given. My hope was that my students would at least learn not to dislike the idea of writing so much. For many of my students, I think I achieved this goal: some grew in appreciate of writing as well as the great need for having solid writing skills.
We began the month with a "pre-test" in which the students had to write a recap of the story of Joshua, the story we had just covered from the Bible. This served to give me a good sense of where each student stood with their writing. I could note what each student needed to focus or work on during the month.
The goal was to move students in the direction of writing their own exegesis. What's an exegesis, you ask?!
An exegesis is the practice of pulling apart a text in order to interpret and understand it.
How were we going to reach that goal? I assigned several in-class writing assignments-this ranged from pushing the sophomores to write a five sentence response to a question, instead of their typical one sentence answer, or asking students to respond to questions based on a passage read in class-and assignments for home. When students worked on a writing piece at home we spent the next class period peer editing. Many of the sophomores had never experienced peer editing before, so this was a great skill to expose to them.
Did we reach our goal? The students definitely got a lot of writing practice! I was not as pleased with their final writing product, which was an exegesis. I think we should have spent more time on perfecting these writing pieces.
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| All but one of the sophomores after presenting Old Testament skits to the class. |
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| Half of the sophomore class at the prayer area in Ms. Otter's classroom. |
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