Written summaries/narrations for middle school grades - grading?

[Rhonda in TX]

I tried to come up with a good title for this post and think I have failed miserably. :tongue_smilie:

 

Anyway, this is what we are doing. I am having the kids (6th and 7th grade) doing notebook pages for history. We are using the History Scribe pages. There is about 9 lines on the page for writing, so I am not looking for pages of information. This is also not a formal writing assignment. That is being covered elsewhere. This is just a record of what they've learned, a way for me to easily see that they learning something. Some weeks we will do 3-4 notebook pages. Some weeks we will do 1. It all depends on what is being covered and what notebook pages are available.

 

My kids have, however, gotten pretty lazy with these, so I'm thinking of grading them. I'd like to come up with a grading rubric, but I'm not sure what I should be looking for. This is not something that will be edited. It's a one-time thing. Any ideas?

[PeterPan]

Well given their ages, and given that those assignments are basically paragraphs, have you thought about requiring an outline? That's what I do with my dd. She has to bring me the outline (keywords will do) before she writes. That way she's not laying down slop. Sort of short circuits the upset at the end of the process thing. And then you could make a very clear checklist of your expectations, a rubric. I don't use one for history, but I certainly have for our other writing. You would include basically anything you want to quantify, clarify, and expect:

 

-outline turned in before writing

-legible

-topic sentence

-any writing elements you have covered in your main program and consider them accountable for (no extreme repetition, no passive, etc.)

-turned in on time

-no basic errors

[Heather in VA]

Our narrations are not writing assignments. By that I mean I don't look for pre-writing exercises, clear topic sentences, supporting information etc. I don't really even focus on punctuation and spelling (although if there is something glaring I mention it). The point of the narration is for the student to take a volume of information they have read, process it, choose the key points and write a summary. Those are the things I'd focus on. If they have read the assigned reading, they should be able to write something. Once they start writing the narrations you'll have an idea of which of the typical narration problems you will run into. Are they retelling the entire reading - all details included? Are they summing up the entire Revolutionary War by saying 'America fought Britain and won'?

 

Just look for a reasonable summary to start and then tweak from there. I have my girls (well not the 6 year old - she does oral narration) do their narrations on the computer to avoid the temptation to skimp or whine because they don't want to physically write it.

 

Heather

[Rhondabee]

One thing that helped mine was for me to fill out some sort of "organization chart" while we were discussing what had been read.

 

I see you have R&S listed as one of your sources. If you read through the writing assignments, then your kids should be familiar with ordering paragraphs in the order of time or in the order of importance. If not, perhaps this would still be helpful - idk. Anyway, I would usually use a more formal-outlinish "list" for discussions that lent themselves to writing in the order of time, and a cluster organization (a circle with the topic thought surrounded by other circles with details) for discussions that were more focused on cause/effect or reasons supporting an opinion.

 

I usually write out our discussion ideas on a 2' x 3' portable white board, and then let my ds use those notes while writing his reports/paragraphs. I do remember having to require a minimum of 5 sentences at one time because the narrations were devolving into one run-on sentence, written as quickly as possible. I think that's when I came up with this system. IIRC, at first I required a sentence for each "blurb" of information, and a concluding sentence.