classroom collective

This is a PDF file of a bunch of student writing samples from Kindergarten up through High School. I thought it was so cool to look at these writing samples (you are given both the student writing and the “translation”) and see how they progress throughout the years, and how they differ across genres and audiences (there are personal essays, fictional stories, dialogue, chapters, and so on). I directly connected this with the Bissex “Patterns of Development in Writing” article we read this week. Bissex talks about differentiation, which is when learners take bigger concepts and move toward a more specific understanding of how they work, and decentration, which is when the learner understands that they have a social audience and that people are going to be reading their work. I noticed this throughout these writing samples, and I noticed the voices changing for each genre and target audience the learners were trying to reach. I saw evidence of differentiation in the changes from kindergarten to first grade alone. In kindergarten, there is definitely knowledge that letters create words to tell a story, however after transitioning to first grade, the students recognize that words have vowels and consonants and the different sounds they make create full words. I also noticed a lot of decentration across the multi genres of writing in this sample. One example is the second grade dialogue writing where the student uses exclamation points and commas and quotation marks to express an energy to the audience that he or she felt at the mariner’s game. The next entry was a more informative piece that was written more seriously about the Titanic. This showed me that these students are recognizing that they are writing for different audiences and are able to write differently for different audiences.