Detailed Expository Purpose & Product Lesson Plans with Daily Editing Practice
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What educators are saying
Description
NOTE: This a special temporary price for this product due to the necessity of teaching in creative ways using distant learning. I will keep it at this price until the end of May. Included in the fee will be daily upoaded videos upon request of any portions you and your students need more guidance on. The videos will first be uploaded to my YouTube page so that any adult or student who has access to the internet will be able to see the videos. Message me through Facebook or email me at writing_doctor if you need guidance on any specific lessons.
Here's a creative approach to detailed STAAR (registered trademark) expository and editing lesson plans you have been looking for! I've spent hundreds of hours putting these 13 weeks of plans together for teachers who need a little more step by step guidance in terms of merging STAAR Editing and Expository, which is 75% of the possible points in 4th, (24 out of 32 points, and 72% of the points students can earn in 7th grade, (33 out of 46 points). For 9th grade expository and editing accounts for 74% of the points in the writing portion of the EOC Test (25 out of 34 points).
I will go into some detail describing this product, and have including over 50 pages in the sample product that you can download for free, but let me share a point of view and perspective from a teacher who used the lesson plans faithfully last year. I will leave the name of the teacher, school, and district anonymous in order to comply with privacy issues.
Here is a testimonial that this teacher sent me during the spring:
"Bill MacDonald - I'm sure you can already tell based on the sheer number of posts I make based on your curriculum, but my team ABSOLUTELY loves your writing curriculum. It's the best we've come across in 50+ years of combined teaching. I was terrified when I found out I was getting moved to 4th grade and that I was going to be "THE WRITING TEACHER" in a departmentalized team. You see, my mom was a very accomplished writer and editor so I felt like nothing I did was ever good enough/ up to expectations. Although my team has not been lucky enough to see you in person, we all follow this page and have purchased your full binder and many additional lessons. I could list a million different reasons as to why we feel your curriculum is the best, however, the lesson that stands out like an angelfish in a sea of blobfish is the WOW/HOOK + WHAT/CIS week. Our team really digs into the lessons along with dressing up. My students went from writing mundane introductions (like we were taught back in the days) to writing the most astonishing attention grabbing HOOKS I've ever seen! They've gone from writing barely a paragraph to BEGGING for extra writing time. Our most reluctant writers now don't stop writing. They also really grasped the thought of how your conclusion should be a "little bit sweeter like a dessert" instead of leftovers."
Her own words might be enough on their own to convince you, but here are the actual results that the hard work of their incredible expository, editing, and revising team produced.
Writing Results 89% Approaches 79% Meets 47% Masters
67% of students getting fives or higher
Many of the struggling students across the grade level were able to get 4s and 5s.
She mentioned that in using my lesson plans as a guide, they focused on only about 4 or 5 complete expository essays this past year.
That is a huge emphasis of these plans: modeling and teaching students how to write a handful of essays well instead of dozens of compositions poorly.
My philosophy of teaching the process of expository is that there should be an emphasis of quality over quantity. Too many campuses and/or districts require students to write an essay every week and sometimes every single day. That approach is more like assigning writing instead of actually teaching it. There is never enough time to give students feedback in terms of development, voice, organization, and/or conventions, so the quality of each essay never really improves. Think of a completed student essay like an X-ray. If the essay has problems, the doctor, (the teacher), has little or no time to model skills that will target student weakness. Many students in Texas only write expository compositions in the testing grades, creating writers who need more surgery than just Band-Aids.
This product gives you and your students lots of time and creative ways to address the entire expository purpose and process from understanding the purpose and prompt, brainstorming and planning, introductions, body paragraphs, conclusions, and transitions. One very important difference between this product and others out there is that there is a heavy emphasis on teaching students how to explain and explode ONE reason very well, not two, three or more reasons with little or no development. This approach gets your kids to do what I often call GPS, Get Pretty Specific with only one or two examples instead of having essays that look like EXAMPLEtory instead of Expository! (That would be an essay that has multiple examples for a reason with very minimal actual explanation.)
Most of the lesson incorporate how to apply expository with both elementary and secondary campuses.
There is also a dedicated amount of time each week to model and practice editing in the areas of capitalization, usage, punctuation, spelling, run-ons, and fragments within the context of whatever expository skill that is being learned that week as much as possible.
For your convenience, I have attached a link to week one and two of the lesson plans which are available separately for only $5 each below. Feel free to purchase those first to see how well they fit your teaching style but more importantly your students' learning style.
Week One:
Week Two:
(STAAR is a federally registered trademark and service mark of the Texas Education Agency. The Writing Doctor/The WRITE Prescription is not sponsored by or associated with the Texas Agency, which has not endorsed the products of services of the Writing Doctor.)
