Reading and Writing for Assessment teaches your students the close-reading and on-demand writing strategies they need to succeed on the new standards assessments. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students learn new skills for analyzing informational texts and writing about them. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by closely reading and responding to a paragraph. Then students write a paragraph of their own in response to a prompt. Afterward, they are primed to learn close-reading and on-demand writing strategies:
Close-Reading Strategies
Close-reading activities help students gain these skills:
- Using the SQ3R reading strategy (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review)
- Finding, analyzing, and inferring controlling sentences (thesis statements and topic sentences)
- Finding and analyzing supporting details (facts, statistics, examples, definitions, quotations, and so on)
- Using evidence from sources and citing the source
- Understanding vocabulary using word parts and context clues
On-Demand Writing Strategies
On-demand writing activities help students gain these skills:
- Analyzing writing prompts to understand the purpose, audience, subject, and type of writing
- Budgeting time for on-demand responses using a compacted writing process
- Writing a response to a writing prompt
- Using a checklist to quickly review the written response and make improvements.