Be on the lookout for your child's informational post test coming home soon. They will be written on notebook paper and have a rubric attached to it. During the unit on informational writing, students learned how to write about something that they know a lot about. Students picked such a variety of topics- Minecraft, hockey, t-ball, gardening, the fair, cleaning a pool, cats, dogs, snowmobiling, etc. I am going to learn a lot from these informational books! Most students are finishing up their informational books. These go into greater detail and are more extensive than what is coming home. The post test that is coming home was used to see what the students took from the lessons. Did students learn that the information needs to be organized into paragraphs and chapters? Did they remember that there should be an illustration or diagram that helps the reader better understand the information? Did they introduce the topic and leave the reader with a concluding statement or chapter? And, can they do all that in an hour time? The unit modeled the step-by-step process of writing an information piece, providing scaffold for the students as they wrote their informational books, and the post test measures what they can do on their own, in one sitting.
Let me know if you have any questions about it, once you see your child's writing. The BIG informational books that your child wrote will be coming home later this year. This week, we are editing them and sharing them in small groups, before turning them in. And, then I need to read through and score them, which takes awhile, if you can imagine reading 60 of them. I am excited to see the students' work and to learn a ton!
Below is a great example of a post test. It has an introduction, information organized by detail-filled chapters, a conclusion, and an illustration or diagram. Phew! That is a lot to do in just an hour!