The students are the curriculum for the first several weeks of Spanish I. We are interviewing students and talking daily in class with lots of repetitions of compelling content wrapped in high frequency vocabulary .
Here is the second timed writing of the year in Spanish I. It is the third week of the new school year. These are the results of two girls in the same class that had not taken Spanish before. Students were instructed to write for five minutes without stopping about information they had learned in class about their classmates. I told them that 100 words was a good goal, and that some may make it by December. I was surprised that these two students wrote more than 100 words. One girl wrote 104 words for an improvement 31 words, the other wrote 112 words, for an improvement of 50 words.Several students wrote in the 80-90 word range.
The objective of timed writing is slow and general improvement over time. Students count the total number of words in Spanish they have written and compare the total to the previous week, so it is mainly a measure against their own selves. I like timed writing because students do not have time to edit. They are writing quickly and without stopping. Whatever is in them comes out, so it functions more like an extemporaneous speaking checkup than a writing sample. What they have acquired comes out.
[…] pressure of writing in a different language. One activity I’d love to try is Roll and Write, Timed Write, and Free Write to give students a chance to let their imaginations do all the work. For more […]