Social Contract and RA Practice

Today's Goal: 

• ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1.A
  Introduce claim(s) and organize the reasons and evidence clearly.
• ELA-LITERACY.W.6.1.D
  Establish and maintain a formal style.
• Begin to create our classroom social contract

Today's Agenda:

1. Entrance Question in the Chat: What's the best kids cartoon show? Why?
2. Breakout Room Activity / Classroom Social Contract
3. R.A.C.E. Paragraphs Introduction
4. RA Practice
5. Letter to Ms. Black? I don't know if we're going to do this. We will find out together.
6. Daily Exit Form
7. Asynchronous Work Time

End of Class Checklist (Did I finish these things?):

• Daily Exit Form
• Respond to TWO (there are 3 options) discussion board questions using the R.A. writing strategy. 

Breakout Room Activity

For today's whole class activity, you will be getting sorted into RANDOM groups! You may or may not know these people. If you do not, you will need to introduce yourself! Make sure you know each other's names, please!

Together, your task will be to try to find TEN things that you all have in common. It can be about anything! Your life. Your interests. Your goals. Your Favorites. Things you DON'T like! It might be hard! That's okay. That's the point. Here is a list of things you could try to talk about: 

• Basic life data: age, school, height, siblings, location, what month you were born in
• Things you like or dislike: food, show, movie, book, music, color, restaurants, season, etc.
• Hobbies and activities you participate in
• Goals for the future

It means speaking with your team and communicating! Also notice that there is a difference between "all of us have the same FAVORITE food" and "all of us really LIKE this food." You might have to look for things that are in the second category and that's okay!

We will come back together after 5-10 minutes and chat!

THEN We will go back to our rooms again and your goal is going to be to come up with TWO answers to the following question:

What can Ms. Black do this year to show that she respects you and everyone in the classroom?

We have THREE questions to talk about, but we're only going to do one at a time. By the time we are done, we will have some goals and expectations that we have created for ourselves. I will ask EVERY group to share the two things they came up with. 

R.A.C.E. Writing Strategy

RACE is a writing strategy we use at TPMS in almost ALL of our classes. The goal is to help create complete, clear sentences and to write with more detail. Knowing these four letters and what they mean will help your writing in EVERY class I promise!

I got you this video:

I also got you this picture:

We are only going to focus on R and A today, which means successfully doing our classwork today means being able to answer a question in one complete sentence. 

I know this is something you are capable of doing! 

You have to do both parts though. 

Here is an example:

What is the best children's television show and why? 

To answer this using the RA strategy, you cannot write:

• Phineas and Ferb.
• It's Phineas and Ferb.
• I think it's Phineas and Ferb.
• I don't know.

The first three had an answer, but they did not have the R in RACE. The last one isn't an answer at all! Sometimes even if you aren't sure, the best option is to come up with something anyway. I believe in you! None of them explain why, which is part of the question!

Also we are going to practice REMOVING the words "I think" from our writing this year. I know it's what you think because you wrote it! Formal academic writing means that you don't have to state the words "I think." Sometimes it's valuable, but we're going to practice writing without it in our class this year! I will tell you when you can use the words "I think."

To restate the question, you can write: 

• The best children's television show is ____ because ___. 
• A really excellent children's show that everyone should watch is ____ because __

There aren't a lot of options here. To restate, you take the question and turn it into a statement. 

Your goal today is going to be to go to the discussion boards on Canvas. There are THREE discussion board options to choose from. You must complete TWO of them. 

RUBRICS and GRADES

This is your first assignment that will receive a SCORE. All of the assignments in our class that receive scores will be scored on a Four point scale.

It looks like this: 

A "passing" score is a 2.5. For this assignment, it means you wrote in complete sentences and you answered the questions using the RA strategy. "Competency" means that you met standards!

To get a higher score, you will be detailed in your answer and make sure to include the reason. It doesn't mean writing more sentences; rather, it might mean writing a more specific sentence and reason. 

To get a lower score, you may have only done one of the two pieces of RA, or you may have not written a complete sentence, or you may have some spelling/grammar mistakes that you can fix. 

If you do not like the score you receive, you will ALWAYS be able to revise work in this class.