Lisa Sealy's 4th Grade

On Friday, November 21, I observed Lisa Sealy's 4th grade Humanities class. Lisa told me that she hadn't planned anything special, that it was just a regular day of class. The class began with some "business": turning in DOL and revision sheets, and a spelling quiz. Pretty ho hum stuff.
But my interest grew with the spelling test, which the students took in pairs. Lisa has them do this because the lists of words are heavily individualized. They begin with a rule on Monday, and some of the words must refer to the rule. However, many of the words come from other resources and are selected by the students; as Lisa puts it, this gives the some "ownership of language." Furthermore, the kids who are really great spellers use the spelling lists as an opportunity to work on their vocabulary. This explains why one boy had on his list expository.
After this, some really great writing instruction--and writing with quick feedback--took place. The class has been working in description and revision, and you'll see how this lesson scaffolded perfectly with their writing process.
The day before, Lisa had read the class a little bit from the start of The Hobbit. Friday, she gave each student a legal-size sheet of paper with the opening paragraph from the novel on one side. The paragraph is a very rich description of a hobbit house. The students were to draw a picture in the blank part of the sheet. Lisa encouraged them to consider "which words bring an image to mind" and the words "which are most helpful." The drew away for a few minutes. Lisa stopped them and instructed them to "mark words in the piece which helped you get a good visual in your head." They then marked some of these on the board. While I won't provide a transcript here of examples, the discussion was quite sophisticated for fourth grade. Students focused on implications of words and the effects they could have on a reader. Lisa kept extending their thinking with basic questions, most often simply "Why?" She also used proper grammatical terms for words, such as adverb and adjective.
Then Lisa turned the tables on the students. She put a majestic scene of Greenland on the boards. Her challenge: "How are you going to put words together so someone would put this picture together?" The kids jumped right to the task. Watching them work, I saw plenty of thoughtful stares into space, flashing eyes right before pencils starting flying, and quick smiles of satisfaction. After writing for just about five minutes, Lisa stopped them so they could share--which they all wanted to do. The pieces were full of vivid, clever, and figurative language. Consider some of these words and phrases: frothy, colossal, "mountains playing with each other," "snow like make-up and powder," and "as if someone took the ocean and sky and mixed them up." Remember, they wrote for just a few minutes. Even within this short time, the students revealed a high level of self-awareness about their writing. One boy prefaced his reading by saying, "This is not really a good starting sentence because it begins with 'it was.'" Lisa provided positive feedback for each piece. After this, Lisa simply told the students to get out their stories and "apply this to it." I'm sure they did.

Because of another appointment, I'd almost left before hearing the drafts. Lisa asked me to stay for a few minutes, and I'm very glad I did. Hearing the pieces and Lisa's final instruction brought the entire experience together for me. It was a very well thought out class, in many ways an exemplar of writing instruction for any level. It also shone because of how certain activities were lower school appropriate while also opening doors to more sophisticated concepts. At the risk of sounding hokey and cliched, it also was a very "whole brain" activity that drove home the essential concepts in multiple engaging ways.