Revise and Revisit Cowboys in the Wild West
Objective
Big Idea
Hook
Common Core Connection
This standard asks students to make changes to their work based on questions and suggestions from others. This requires students to take lessons from the teacher's modeling, do some deep evaluation, and analyze changes to make the necessary revisions. I will be doing a lot of supporting, guiding, and modeling to help students meet this standard, but as they get better at it I will back off. When approaching this standard keep in mind this is all new to first graders, and they little experience with the process of editing.
Lesson Overview
For the whole group part of this lesson, I am revisiting a lesson where the paragraph we created in the guided practice was weak due to a technology and resource problem. So, together, we will make changes to improve that paragraph. Then the students will work with their partner to make changes to the work they did in the partner work of the previous lesson.
Students work in small (Butter Jelly Partner) and doTransitions about every twenty minutes in this lesson. I have a video on each strategy in the resources.
Introductory Activity
To get the class engaged I direct their attention to our previous work on the board, and tell the students to discuss what changes they might make to this paragraph to make it better. While they talk I assess their prior knowledge.
Then I share the lesson plan and goal. The class chants the goal, "I can make changes to improve my work."
Guided Practice
Student Reflection
This is the time in the lesson that I like to allow the students to practice their speaking and listening skills, which are skills that Common Core emphasizes. So, several students read their paragraph, while other listen so they can give the speaker feedback and ideas about how they can improve their work. I am looking for comments like, "I think you need a topic sentence ..." or "You should do a closing sentence."
Closing
At this time in the lesson I like to use formative assessment to see what my students know. The fastest and most efficient way for me is to have the students talk to their partner about two things they learned about revising a paragraph. I listen and then share some of their great ideas.
Then we chant the lesson goal and I share my plan for future lessons. Chanting the goal is a nice way to have the class reflect on the important things in the lesson.
