Oh No!!

I apologize!
The week in the field showed me a lot about writing. I got to have writing conferences with a few children based on their persuasive pieces about whether our not they believe their school should get school uniforms. Reading them all was very interesting to see different ideas that children have about why this may or may not be a good thing. I was very surprised at the number of students who were in favor of school uniforms, but this is probably a good thing because the number of parents who voted in favor of it was apparently extremely high. Several children proposed the idea that school uniforms would be good on Monday-Thursday, but that they wanted to be given free choice for their clothes on Fridays. It was great to read the students' personal work and it allowed me to see how creative they were and how good they were at putting voice into their writing. I was actually extremely surprised at how many of them used interesting hooks and inserted questions or did other things to make their writing unique and interesting.
I also got to participate in the grading of their writing prompts. They had to write a persuasive piece about where the class should go on the next field trip. Again, I was very impressed at the style with which many of these 4th graders wrote their essays. I was also very impressed with the creativity they showed in selecting a location and coming up with reasons. My mentor teacher said the same thing. She had expected to get a large number of papers suggesting Disney World or Six Flags. Instead, many students had us traveling to other countries or other much more exotic locations. Not only did these students come up with a very unique field trip location, but they were able to back it up with reasons why they thought their location would be a beneficial field trip for the class. It was pretty eye opening to see how well these kids are able to write. This was the first time I had seen them do writing where the focus was actually the writing itself, not writing about some other subject, so the quality of writing was much higher than I had ever seen from them before. They were definitely tough to grade though. It's a much different type of grading scale than I'm used to using, and it seemed difficult to make sure that you were being fair and avoiding comparing one child's paper with the next. It made me nervous, but it was a good experience! And I'm glad to have finally seen the students' writing!