School Improvement in Maryland

Using the VSC: Reading/ELA, Grade 6

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Writing:

Reading/ELA:

Writing

Standard 4.0 Writing

Students will compose in a variety of modes by developing content, employing specific forms, and selecting language appropriate for a particular audience and purpose.

Topic

A. Writing

Indicator

  • 1. Compose texts using the prewriting and drafting strategies of effective writers and speakers
Objectives
  1. Use a variety of self-selected prewriting strategies to generate, select, narrow, and develop ideas
    • Evaluate topics for personal relevance, scope, and feasibility
    • Begin a coherent plan for developing ideas
    • Explore and evaluate relevant sources of information
  2. Select, organize, and develop ideas appropriate to topic, audience, and purpose
    • Organize information logically
    • Use effective organizational structures
    • Select or eliminate information as appropriate
    • Verify the effectiveness of paragraph development by modifying topic, support, and concluding sentences as necessary

Indicator

  • 2. Compose oral, written, and visual presentations that express personal ideas, inform, and persuade
Objectives
  1. Compose to express personal ideas by experimenting with a variety of forms and techniques suited to topic, audience, and purpose to develop an awareness of voice and tone
  2. Describe in prose and/or poetic forms to clarify, extend, or elaborate on ideas by using vivid language such as imagery, figurative language, and sound elements
  3. Compose to inform using relevant support and a variety of appropriate organizational structures and signal words within a paragraph
  4. Compose to persuade by supporting, modifying, or disagreeing with a position, using effective rhetorical strategies
    • Support, modify, or disagree with a position and generate convincing evidence to support it
    • Consider the effectiveness of diction, audience appeal, and organization
    • Use connotation, repetition, and figurative language to control audience emotion and reaction
    • Use authoritative citations
  5. Use writing-to-learn strategies such as dialect journals, quickwrites, and mindmaps to make connections between learning and prior knowledge
  6. Manage time and process when writing for a given purpose

Indicator

  • 3. Compose texts using the revising and editing strategies of effective writers and speakers
Objectives
  1. Revise texts for clarity, completeness, and effectiveness
    • Eliminate redundant and irrelevant words and ideas
    • Clarify meaning through the placement of antecedents, modifiers, connectors, and transitional devices
    • Coordinate equal ideas within a sentence
    • Subordinate less important ideas within a sentence using phrases and clauses
    • Maintain consistent person, number and tense
    • Modify sentences from passive to active voice
    • Vary sentence types and lengths to clarify and extend meaning and to develop style
  2. Use suitable traditional and electronic resources to refine presentations and edit texts for effective and appropriate and conventions such as capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and pronunciation
    • Self edit
    • Peer edit
    • Dictionary
    • Thesaurus
    • Spell checker
    • Language handbook
    • Grammar checker
  3. Prepare the final product for presentation to an audience

Indicator

  • 4. Identify how language choices in writing and speaking affect thoughts and feelings
Objectives
  1. Use precise word choice, formal to informal, based on audience, situation, or purpose
  2. Consider the connotative and/or denotative meanings of words when selecting vocabulary
  3. Consider how word choices affect the audience

Indicator

  • 5. Assess the effectiveness of choice of details, organizational pattern, word choice, syntax, use of figurative language, and rhetorical devices in the student's own composing
Objectives
  1. Assess the effectiveness of diction that reveals his or her purpose
    • Language appropriate for a particular audience
    • Language suitable for a given purpose
    • Words/phrases/sentences that extend meaning in a given context
  2. Explain how the specific language and expression used by the writer or speaker affects reader/listener response
  3. Evaluate the use of transitions in a text

Indicator

  • 6. Explain how textual changes alter tone, clarify meaning, address a particular audience, or fulfill a purpose
Objectives
  1. Identify the tone of one's own writing, and revise word choice to modify tone in order to address a given purpose and/or audience
  2. Justify revisions in syntax and diction from a previous draft of his or her same text by explaining how the change affects meaning

Indicator

  • 7. Locate, retrieve and use information from various sources to accomplish a purpose
Objectives
  1. Identify, evaluate, and use sources of information on a self-selected and/or given topic
  2. Use various information retrieval sources (traditional and/or electronic) to obtain information on a self-selected and/or given topic
  3. Use appropriate note taking procedures, organizational strategies, and proper documentation of sources of information
    • Appropriate strategies for taking notes
      • Appropriate strategies for organizing source information or notes
      • Information to include or exclude when using a note taking method
      • Advantages, disadvantages, or limitations of a given strategy or procedure for recording or organizing information
      • Advantages, disadvantages, or limitations of asources of information such as bias, accuracy, availability, variety currency
      • Use a recognized format for documentation such as MLA
  4. Synthesize information from two or more sources to fulfill a self-selected or given purpose
  5. Use a recognized format to credit sources when paraphrasing, summarizing, and quoting to avoid plagiarism

Indicators/objectives that include assessment limits are assessed on MSA *New Standards identifies the need for students to process 1 million words per year to maintain academic progress.

11/15/07