This year writing with third graders has been a huge challenge for me. The kids are on a variety of different levels after three years of writing instruction from teachers who had a variety of teaching methods.
We finished our information writing unit and then started to work on some constructed responses like they will see on the state test. It was very challenging for them.
GA's Milestone test rubrics
I love using Lucy Calkins writing workshop lessons, but I found that they do not prepare kids to write a constructed response. I had to create a bunch of lesson plans to help them and to really demonstrate how to achieve the goals on the 7 point rubric for our state.
Constructed Responses lesson plans for writing workshop on Teachers Pay Teachers
Help students learn how to write a constructed response with this resource for grades 3-5
Even if your state's rubric is slightly different, these lesson plans teach students to respond to the question, cite the text, provide evidence for their answer, and how to elaborate or explain the evidence.
