Year 9 Sos: Working in the Goldilocks zone #4b: The Dawn Raids skill building

After learning the content around the Dawn Raids, we looked at how we could apply our learnings in an essay.  To do this, I wanted to reinforce the importance of planning to write and to use what they've learnt in a logical way.  In the past, I haven't spent too much time scaffolding the context in such a way, as I've felt as year 9's, kids might get overwhelmed with the structuring of an essay and get bored so I've tended to stick with telling them what they need to write about and not so much on how to write about what they need to write about (if that makes sense).  I've realised the more time I invest now in teaching them how to write an essay, the less time it would take when they get to senior school.

PART TWO:

Learn … the skill of essay writing

We started the skills lessons by brainstorming everything we knew and had learnt about the Dawn Raids.  I allowed students to add to the board if they remembered something later on.  This took about 15 minutes to do.

We created themes and decided that these would become our paragraphs and then we put them into a chronological order of when they had occurred happened.  

Then I went through how to write a good essay by breaking down the question and using the T.E.X model for the paragraphs and a hamburger model for the essay that they know.

Then for each theme, there were at least 3 key points which essentially gave them 3 points to write about.  I tried to create a flow chart of the process below using a students example (link to work here).  These 3 points turned into small T.E.X paragraphs.

Create… the essay.

After building the blocks, students then created the essay. 

Reflection

For those who stuck it out, they did really well, there were some really extraordinary essays.  But I probably gave them too much to do and to think about which meant I lost a couple of kids along the way.  Many kids started, but didn't finish which is something I need to look it more closely.  I'm going to revisit this model during the year, as I've learnt again, that less is definitely more with regards to how to structure an essay.