March 19th, 2015

Robot Word Webs

Gretchen Solinger, Student Representative

I recently completed my student teaching experience and had the opportunity to try out many different types of assessment, as well as observing how my cooperating teachers handled assessment and evaluation. I noticed there was a big push for literacy in all subjects in my school district, so for most of my projects I tried to find ways to incorporate writing in assessment.

My biggest project over the course of my student teaching experiment was a five-week robot relief sculpture with 3rd grade students. In order to assess the robots, I researched different types of brainstorming activities for creating a piece of writing. I decided to have students write a couple sentences about their artwork, describing color, shape, and texture. I had students sit with their finished piece and create a word web that allowed them to focus on words, not creating complete sentences. The students then used the word web to create a couple sentences that described their robot. This way, I was able to determine how well the students understood vocabulary from the lesson and the students had an easier time writing because of the word web. I was really pleased with how well the students did, and the students enjoyed sharing their word webs and descriptive sentences.