Jennifer Engo ELD 307 Professor Rich 4/9/13 Writing Assessment Elementary School is really the time where

students start to develop their writing skills that they will build off of for the rest of their lives. For this assessment I have chosen an eight-year-old girl from my second grade classroom. I picked her because I knew that she was the middle child in her family and I was curious to see how her siblings have contributed to her writing and how school has helped her refine her home learned skills. In both the interview portion of this assignment and the observation of the students work, I got an overall sense of the students abilities and shortcomings. During my interview portion with my student I really got a chance to understand where she was in terms of where she was as a writing student. As I was talking to my student (Selena for reference name) I realized that she was more influenced at home by writing before she came to school. I asked her questions about her writing and how she feels about it, and her overall response was very positive. Before she could write herself she always saw her older sister doing her homework and was naturally curious to see what her sister was doing in school. She made it clear that it was her own idea to copy her sisters homework when she completed it, and her sister often would get angry with her for stealing her homework. I went on to asking her more about her current writing and she became

very excited since she had recently gotten a diary from her mother. She said she got to write down all sorts of things in there like stuff she was doing on the weakened and she could write down feelings if she was sad or mad. Currently the class as a whole is now working on making their writing in essay form to prepare themselves for second grade and she wanted to make sure I knew how excited she was. She said that she had been practicing at home when she wrote stories down in her diary. Next, we talked about if writing for her was easy or hard. She started off by saying that since she was copying her older sisters work writing looked really difficult at first but throughout her own schooling writing has become much easier for her to accomplish on her own. The only thing that she was trouble with sometimes is spelling, but she often tries to spell out the word as best as possible the first time and then asks for help from her teacher or one of her parents. We closed the interview by talking about her family and their writing abilities. She told me that both of her parents have an office and their own computer so they can write important things for work. They need a lot of concentration when they are completing these tasks just like she needs quiet time when she is concentrating on her homework. She then talked about how her youngest sister is just known learning to write, and unlike her older sister she wants to help her little sister learn to write so it wont be so hard for her to learn in school. The next portion of this assessment was the looking through of the students previous writing work they have done in the class. I found a few different types of writing that she had completed from various parts of the school year, and overall the first thing I noticed was that her handwriting was incredible neat for an eight

year old. When I approached my cooperating teacher about her work she said that she really does love to practice her handwriting during her free time because she likes to keep all her work nice and neat. One piece of Selenas writing that caught my attention was something called a Writing Opinion Reviews worksheet. The worksheet consists of two sections. The first section is where she wrote her topic and the second section is where she wrote three reasons why the topic of her choice is the best. For example her first topic was on fairys. Again she spelled the word the way she believed it sounded. The three reasons she had written down on why fairies were the best were, 1. They have amazingly cool movies. 2. They have awesome fairy talents. 3. They have winter and simmer leirde of fairys. She was able to comprehend the activity and gave clear and concise reasons why she believes fairies are the best. The only places that she lacks in is her spelling in some areas such as spelling attention as etention and quick as quik. What I have taken away from observing Selenas writing was that she does have a passion for writing and is eager to learn more about it. She is able to use punctuation correctly, such as question marks, periods, and exclamation points. She loves to write for school as just as much as she loves to write outside of school. When there is a group writing assignment attached to a reading task she often volunteers to be the person who writes down the stuff that the group is discussing. Overall viewing her work reinforced what she was discussing in her interview about loving to write. As a future teacher how I would approach this situation next is to help Selena branch out her writing skills. I already know her only weak points is spelling and that she loves to write stories of fiction at home. One thing she doesnt have much

experience in is writing on non-fiction subjects such as presidents or animals. I believe having a class writing assignment based on facts of a non-fiction animal would be incredibly beneficial to all the students. The task does prepare them for the next year when they may be talking more about these things in a science or social studies unit. Overall I believe it would benefit Selena as a writer as well as the rest of the class.