Julia M. Biagiarelli
This unit will be presented to students of all abilities who are attending fourth grade at Davis Street Interdistrict Magnet School where writing is co-taught by certified special education teachers and certified elementary school teachers. Fourth-grade literacy instruction includes: reading comprehension, reading fluency, narrative writing, spelling and grammar. Narrative writing is the focus of the Direct Assessment of Writing on the Connecticut Mastery Test, which is administered in March.
Connecting the arts to academics is part of the mission statement of Davis Street Interdistrict Magnet School. Therefore, collaboration between classroom teachers and art teachers will also contribute to the success of teaching this unit.
Those who work with younger children often experience that they are very eager to express the details of their lives by creating images and relating their stories orally. However, transforming these stories and experiences into cohesive narrative pieces is a challenge for many young writers. The goal of this unit is to teach students how to recreate those images and oral expressions in writing while realizing the relationships among their visual expression, their oral expression, and their written expression.