Common Core State Standards in Writing

Advanced Writing Workshop

Common Core Standards in Writing

“We must remember that no matter the state standard or national goal for our teaching, the horizons we lead our students toward are neither nearby nor narrow. We teach for no less than to offer our children ways to understand and make meaning of the world; we offer them skills and strategies for learning and for becoming more powerful.”

-Lucy Calkins

Common Core Standards in Writing

English Language Arts Standards » Anchor Standards » College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for

Writing K-5

Text Types and Purposes1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of

substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

Common Core Standards in Writing

English Language Arts Standards » Anchor Standards » College and Career Readiness

Anchor Standards for Writing 6-12Text Types and Purposes1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of

substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

Common Core Standards in Writing

In order to get the quality of writing necessary to meet the rigor of the Common Core State Standards, attention and detail needs to be taught through the teaching of strategies, so that they become automatic to the learner.

Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing

• Reading with a Writer's Eye In this session, students will study mentor texts in partnerships and identify the qualities of strong narrative writing that these stories demonstrate.

• Starting with Turning Points In this session, you'll introduce students to a strategy for generating narrative ideas by thinking of first times, last times, or times they realized something important.

• Starting with Strong Feelings In this session, you'll introduce students to another strategy for generating narrative ideas by writing the name of a strong feeling on the page.

• Yesterday's Revisions Become Today's Standard Practice In this session, you'll guide students to set goals for lifting the quality of their writing by using all they've learned so far about writing and studying mentor texts.

• Listening for Significance in Seed Ideas In this session, you'll teach students in partnerships how to be great listeners by drawing out the possibilities in each other's seed entries.

Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing

• Writers Ask, "What Am I Really Trying to Say?" In this session, you'll teach students to carefully consider what their stories are really about as an aid to truly craft and revise their narrative.

• Studying and Creating Leads In this session, students study how other authors write their leads and then craft their own leads in similar styles.

• Telling the Story From Inside It In this session, you'll teach students to write from the narrator's point of view.

• Bringing Forth the Internal Story In this session, students learn that bringing out the deep connection between external actions and internal responses can strengthen their personal narratives.

• Adding Scenes from the Past and Future In this session, you'll teach students that writers use scenes from the past or future to bring out the internal story and add power to our narratives.

• Bringing Forth the Story Arc In this session, students learn that a powerful way to revise their narratives is to bring out the story structure.

Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing

• Ending Stories In this session, you will teach children that writers don't just end stories, we resolve problems, learn lessons, and make changes to end them effectively.

• Editing: The Power of Commas In this session, students will study how commas are used in writing they admire and then use commas in their own writing to make it more exact.

• Reading Aloud Our Writing: A Ceremony of Celebration In this session, students will have an opportunity to share their writing with an audience, thus bringing their writing to culmination.

Breathing Life into Essays• Collecting Ideas as Essayists

In this session, you will teach children how to collect writing that can be developed into essays and invite them to become essay writers. You'll show them that writers observe the world with care and then think about their observations, recording them in writing.

• Growing Essay Ideas in Notebooks In this session, you will again teach children ways writers collect writing for essays. You'll teach them to be more thoughtful about what they see, writing at greater length.

• Contrasting Narrative and Non-Narrative Structures In this session, you will orient children to the genre of essays by contrasting essay structures with the structure of narratives. You will teach children that writers need a sense of what they are aiming for in order to collect, elaborate on and structure their writing.

• Using Conversational Prompts to Spur Elaboration In this session, you will teach children that they need to stay with their essay topics for longer stretches of time by having discussions with themselves about their ideas.

• Generating Essay Writing from Narrative Writing In this session, you will teach children to revisit narrative entries collected earlier in the year, this time layering them with insights and embedding them into ideas.

Breathing Life into Essays• Finding and Crafting Thesis Statements

In this session, you will teach children that writers reread their writing to find or invent a seed idea, a thesis.

• Boxes and Bullets: Framing Essays In this session, you will teach children that essayists frame their writing before they draft. You will demonstrate some strategies for doing so.

• Learning to Outgrow a First Thesis In this session, you will teach children that writers freewrite and ask questions in an effort to outgrow early drafts of a thesis statement.

• Composing and Sorting Mini-Stories In this session, you will teach children to write, angle and unpack ministories that support the ideas they want to advance.

• Seeking Outside Sources In this session, you will teach children that writers seek outside sources, other people's stories, to support our ideas in essay writing.

• Creating Parallelism in Lists In this session, you will teach children that writers structure information to support a claim in the same way again and again. Writers create parallelism that can begin in a list.

Breathing Life into Essays• Revising Toward Honesty

In this session, you will teach children that writers strive to tell the truth, even when inventing what happened.

• Gathering a Variety of Information In this session, you will teach children that writers gather a variety of information to support our claims. You'll demonstrate strategies writers use for collecting and writing with that information.

• Organizing for Drafting In this session, you will teach children that writers take collected files of writing and transform them into a draft by organizing and piecing them together.

• Building a Cohesive Draft In this session, you will teach children strategies writers use to create cohesion in drafts, using repeated phrases and logically sequencing information.

• Writing Introductions and Conclusions In this session, you will teach children the ways writers commonly open and close essays. You'll help children try these ways in their own essays.

• Celebrating Journeys of Thought In this session, students will share the personal discoveries they have made in this unit as they celebrate with family and friends. They will celebrate their essays, the writing that led to them and the discoveries about themselves and the world they made along the way.

Writing Fiction: Big Dreams Tall Ambitions

• Imagining Stories from Ordinary Moments In this session, you will teach children that fiction writers get ideas for stories from daily life and from past writing. You'll help them get started doing that.

• Imagining Stories We Wish Existed in the World In this session, you'll tell students that one strategy writers use to get ideas for stories is to imagine the books we wish existed in the world.

• Developing Believable Characters In this session, students will learn that fiction writers need to choose a seed idea and begin to develop characters by creating their external and internal traits.

• Giving Characters Struggles and Motivations In this session, you will teach children that writers develop characters not only by telling about their motivations and struggles, but also by creating scenes that show these things.

• Plotting with a Story Mountain In this session, you will teach children that writers sketch out possible plotlines for stories often on "story mountains" that represent traditional story structure.

Writing Fiction: Big Dreams Tall Ambitions

• Show Don't Tell: Planning and Writing Scenes In this session, you will teach children that, in a sense, writing scenes is the same as writing Small Moment stories. Writers often begin by putting the character into action or by laying out the character's exact words, and then unfolding the moment, step by step.

• Feeling and Drafting the Heart of Your Story In this session, you will teach children that fiction writers create our best drafts when we experience the world through our character's skin, letting the story unfold as it happens to us.

• Studying Published Leads to Make Leads In this session, you will explain that just as fiction writers revise with lenses, they edit with them as well, rereading their writing several times for several reasons, editing as they go.

• Orienting Readers with Setting In this session, you will remind children that as they write they need to "stay in the scene," making sure the action and dialogue are grounded in the setting.

• Writing Powerful Endings In this session, you will teach children that writers of fiction do their best to craft the endings that their stories deserve. In particular, they make sure their endings mesh with and serve the purposes of their stories.

Writing Fiction: Big Dreams Tall Ambitions

• Revision: Rereading with a Lens In this session, you will teach children that when revising, writers don't simply reread, we reread with a lens. Writers vary their lenses according to what the writer values for her work.

• Making a Space for Writing In this session, you will tell children about the intimate work space you've created for your writing and teach them that they can create their own spaces inside their writing notebooks and their homes.

• Using Mentor Texts to Flesh Out Characters In this session, you will remind students that writers study mentor authors to notice what other writers do that works well. One thing writers do is use actions and revealing details to show rather than tell about characters.

• Editing with Various Lenses In this session you will teach children to listen to our writing carefully, then choosing words, structures and punctuation that help us to convey the content, mood, tone, and feelings of the piece.

• Publishing Anthologies: A Celebration In this session, writers will have an opportunity to see their work published in book form, and to experience the thrill of receiving reviews on their contribution to the class anthology.

Literacy Essays: Writing About Reading

• Writing Inside the Story In this session, you'll teach children that good readers flesh out stories by envisioning them and living vicariously through the characters. You'll teach children to try this first on paper, in preparation for trying it mentally.

• Gathering Writing by Close Reading In this session, you'll remind children that writers read with an attentiveness to detail that can spark larger ideas. You'll show again how writers can use conversational prompts to extend their thinking and their writing about a text.

• Gathering Writing by Studying Characters In this session, you will teach children that experts know that certain features of their subject-character, for example, for literary essayists- merit special attention. Therefore, essayists study characters to grow significant topics.

• Elaborating on Written Ideas Using Conversational Prompts In this session, you will teach children one way writers elaborate on their ideas-in this case, ideas about character. You'll guide children through a discussion that has the same features as a written analysis of a text, reminding children that conversational prompts are also useful as writing prompts.

• Developing Provocative Ideas: "What Is This Story Really About?" In this session, you will teach children that literary essayists ask, "What's this story really about?" and then analyze the ways the author deliberately crafts the story to convey this meaning.

Literacy Essays: Writing About Reading

• Developing Provocative Ideas: "How Does This Story Intersect with My Life?" In this session, you will teach children some ways that literary essayists draw on their life experience to understand and develop ideas about texts.

• Finding and Testing a Thesis Statement In this session, you will teach students that writers select seed ideas to craft into thesis statements. You'll teach students ways to question and revise their theses as writers do, making sure each is supportable by the whole text.  

• Framing Essays In this session, you'll teach students that writers plan their essays, making sure they can deliver the evidence from the text that their thesis promises.

• Using Stories as Evidence In this session, you'll demonstrate ways that essayists collect and angle mini-stories as evidence to support their claims.

• Using Summaries as Evidence In this session, you'll explain summaries and offer an example, then demonstrate how essayists use summaries to help them support their points. You'll outline the steps children can take to create summaries for their essays.

Literacy Essays: Writing About Reading

• Using Lists as Evidence In this session, you'll remind children of work they did during the personal essay unit in using lists to support their claims. You'll again encourage them to write "tight lists" in which they write with parallelism.

• Using Descriptions of Author's Craftsmanship as Evidence In this session, you will teach children that writers study the choices authors make in their texts in order to find evidence to support their claims. You will support children in learning to do this.

• Putting It All Together-Constructing Literary Essays In this session, you will teach children some of the ways that writers create drafts out of collections of evidence. You'll also teach children ways to study published literary essays in order to find structures for their own literary essays.

• Packaging and Polishing Literary Essays In this session, you'll teach children some ways to make final revisions and edits to their essays. You'll show them how to write introductory and ending paragraphs, to import some specialized vocabulary, and to handle citations with more finesse.

• A Celebration: Publishing as Literary Scholars In this session, children will be able to "publish" their literary essays in the tradition of literary scholars. Children will put their work in the hands of those who have studied the same text. They will have the opportunity to see their ideas used to build new thinking about texts and life.

Memoir: Art of Writing Well• Uncovering Life Topics

In this session, you will teach children that writers usually have several themes that surface in our writing again and again. You'll invite children to uncover these topics for themselves by rereading their notebooks looking for connections and asking, "What's this really about?"

• Writing Small About Big Topics In this session, you will teach children that writers often write about significant topics and big ideas by writing focused stories to illustrate them. You'll teach children ways to take the writing strategies they've learned to date and apply them to this task.

• Expecting Depth from Our Writing In this session, you will teach children that writers of memoir dive deep into their topics. You will share some strategies for writing with greater depth than ever before and will invite children to join you in creating more strategies to achieve this. View Session 3  

• Reading Literature to Inspire Writing In this session, you will teach children another strategy writers use to write with depth-reading literature and letting its power help us write about our own topics.

• Choosing and Developing a Seed Idea In this session, you will remind children of the ways they have focused in on a seed idea in previous units. You will teach them that writers use all these ways and more to develop writing, and that each writer needs to invent and adapt a unique process to reach each writing goal.

Memoir: Art of Writing Well• Studying Memoir Structures

In this session, you will teach children that writers study published texts to get ideas for ways to structure their own texts. You will demonstrate reading a text and studying its structure to help students learn how to do this.

• Being Our Own Teachers In this session you will teach children ways to confer with themselves. You will teach children a few questions to ask themselves in order to assess themselves, plan their goals and choose their paths to those goals.

• Finding Inspiration Before Drafting In this session, you will teach children some ways that writers inspire themselves to write better than ever as they move to first drafts.

• The Internal and External Journey of a Story In this session, you will teach children that that as each point on the external timeline of a story affects the central character (in a memoir, you) on the inside, this creates the internal timeline of a story. Today you'll teach children ways that writers craft stories that include internal journeys.

• Choosing Emblematic Details In this session, you will teach children that writers can reveal characters (ourselves) not only by bringing forth internal thoughts, but also by spotlighting significant details.

Memoir: Art of Writing Well• Writing About Ideas

In this session you will teach children that when writers write about ideas, just as when we write about events, it is important to find or create a structure that allows us to say what we want to say.

• Letting Our Pages Lead Our Revision In this session you will teach students ways that writers reread our writing intently, in order to learn from it how we need to revise.

• Metaphors and Meanings In this session, you will teach children that writers take a tiny detail from our lives-often something that could be very ordinary-and we let that one detail represent the whole big message of writing.

• Editing to Match Sound to Meaning In this session you will teach children to listen to our writing carefully, then choosing words, structures and punctuation that help us to convey the content, mood, tone, and feelings of the piece.

• An Author's Celebration: Placing Our Writing in the Company of Others In this session, children will read aloud their memoir to their friends and family. Listeners will say a few lines of a chorus between readings.

Information and Opinion Writing Continuums

We have recently developed two new writing continua, one for opinion/argument writing and one for informational writing. These continua are closely aligned to the narrative continuum both in content and structure, with twelve levels (Levels 11-12 forthcoming) for grades K-8, and language designed to support teachers in assessing writing and developing teaching points. Studied side by side, the three continua show how the different types of writing are connected and how work in one bolsters the others. Additionally, these new continua are closely aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

~Reading and Writing Project

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http://tc.readingandwritingproject.com/members/user/materials.html

http://readingandwritingproject.com/resources/assessments/performance-assessments.html

Common Core State Standards in Writing

English Language Arts Grade Level Considerations for Grades 3-5

http://www.smarterbalanced.org/smarter-balanced-assessments/item-writing-and-review/