Take Home Activities

This page is where you can locate take home activities when your child is not at school, or home-schooled. This is NOT a replacement for an educational program, rather a supplement to one. Activities will be organized according to subject or skill assessed.
RAFT (A WRITING STRATEGY)

RAFT is a great way to formulate writing and to give writing a purpose. As shown below, RAFT is simple!
 Tesol 2010: Differentiation, Language Objectives
RAFT can help students organize their writing, and can even help educators come up with a writing prompt. Here is a sample prompt, I will highlight the role in yellow, the audience in blue, the format in green and the topic in purple.

You are the president of the United States,you have to write a letter to the prime minister of Australia. You are writing this letter about how to save the koala bears.

I encourage you to try it out on your own and make your own writing prompts and share them in the comments!

Now take a look at this chart:
Frontloading Vocabulary in Core Content Classes: Instructional ...

Can you write at least 4 sentences about this? Try it out in the comments as well!

THE WRITING PROCESS

I love talking about the writing process. The process that we will be going over is chunked into five stages:
The Writing Process | Writing process chart, Writing process posters
We will go over each stage individually.

Prewrite

    • This is the first stage in the writing process, and this is one of the most important. Without proper prewriting,the further stages are nearly, if not completely impossible. Idea webs are a great way to kick-start the writing process and formulate some thoughtful ideas, this is one of several; types of mind maps.  Here is what an idea web looks like:
Prewriting Web | UDL Strategies - Goalbook Toolkit
See if you can make an idea web about something in the room with you!

A slightly different type of map is called a concept map. A concept map is different than a mind map for many reasons. As you see in the above mind map, the map focuses on one single idea. In a concept map on the other hand, there is not a single idea but multiple concepts. Concept maps are typically much more complex. Here is a good visual showing the difference:

The Differences Between Mind Maps and Concept Maps
As you can probably see, concept maps can help you visualize a concept's relationship with the main idea. Concept maps vary in appearance although it is important that they show these relationships. Here are two examples:
Concept Map About Plants
This concept uses images, while still being a true concept map.
Concept Map


As you see, concept maps can be very complex.
To make sure you understand, try drawing a mind map and a concept map yourselves and tell which one is different. If you can, take a picture of your work and put it in the comments! I'd love to see.



Draft
Drafting is something we all have done before, and some have done it unknowingly! In writing, the concept of drafting is not complicated at all. Making a draft of a writing piece just means that you create a temporary version! This version usually will contain errors that we will fix in the later stages. A draft will be the "test run" of your compete story. If you think you got this down, make a draft for the prompt that we made earlier!
What is drafting

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