Mrs. Call, M.Ed.

Announcements

5th and 8th grade students will be taking the Direct Writing Assessment (DWA) in February. This program allows the students to practice their writing and be scored based upon the 6 Traits of writing which is used for the testing and is used at our school. We had the opportunity to try it out last week. Each student is able to practice at home by accessing www.utahwrite.com and then putting in their username (their last name) and the password is call (no capitals). From now on every writing assignment in my class will be done through Utah Write and the students will be graded accordingly. It is my hope that this will help your child's writing skills increase.

You can also access the website on this page in the book mark section or on the homepage under documents.

Odyssey Charter School is implementing the 6+1 Traits of Writing. Students will learn to write using ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, voice, and content. Each trait will be covered in a 5 week period using a variety of activities to enhance the students learning. Every Friday, there will be a writing activity that includes what they have learned that week.

In addition to the 6 Traits Writing program, students will be learning how to write a 5 paragraph essay, biographies, newspaper articles, research papers, narratives, expositories, creative writing, persuasive writing and advertisements. While learning how to write these types of papers, students will use what they learn in the 6 Traits of Writing. Each writing assignment will be graded from a rubric that was created by 6 Traits.

Students will have a lot of opportunities to present their writings to the class in what I call an Author's Share. They will also have opportunities to share their work with partners only. This covers the +1 trait of the 6 Traits of Writing, which is presentation.