Skip to main content

Random Idea - Writing Folders




When I moved to the elementary school from the middle school I was hired to teach math, science, and writing. While the writing seemed random I found I actually enjoyed teaching it. I love to write and I love to read what kids write (really hated the grading...particularly since I had over 45 students that first year).

That first year my students wrote some really fun things and like a good teacher I made comments, put a grade on it, and sent it home in student's weekly folders. As a mother, whenever I got those papers from my son I would mean to save them but they generally got trashed by the end of the school year. I wanted to try something different the next year and put together writing folders.

I bought about 30 white two pocket folders from Wal-Mart when they were on sale for .10 or .15 cents. I had students decorate them in the first week and kept them in a plastic tub. Anytime students had a writing assignment finished it went into that folder and stayed there for the entire year. My students had a weekly assignment to give me five sentences (or more) on any one topic so I had quite a lot of writing samples for each child (this was a "homework" assignment that I always gave students time to do in class....if they messed around in class they actually had to do it as homework). I explained to parents at our open house that they would not see writing come home on a weekly basis and showed them a sample file folder. I said that writing grades would posted regularly online for parents to check and if they wanted to see something specific they were more then welcome to come and look through their child's writing folder. Nobody ever came in.

The folders were great to show at parent/teacher conferences. I had one boy who just refused to write and I showed parents the lack of work in the folder compared with his classmates. Another child's writing was very immature and I was able to pull out samples while I was talking to her parent.

At the end of the year the folders went home with their reading projects and science notebook. As a mom, I would have LOVED to have had everything handed to me at the end of the year like this, instead of piece meal throughout the year.

I had one mom come in at the end of the year saying how much she enjoyed pulling out all of her son's writing and seeing his progress as well as having everything in one neat easy to keep folder.
I did kept one child's folder and passed it to the fifth grade writing teacher. I was very concerned about his writing/spelling but couldn't get him in any special services for it the entire year. I thought the fifth grade teacher might like a heads up and some fourth grade samples for comparison and for evidence of a continued disability in writing.

I've heard that some schools require writing portfolios and those tend to be more structured, with very specific writing samples kept in them, which get passed from grade to grade with student records. We don't have that requirement and even if we did I would still keep this idea as a great end of year keepsake for parents and children.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more