Today in English class we created a retelling rubric that is aligned with the anchor text we are using for our Grade 2 buddies.  My students have read and re-read the text many times and are quite familiar with the story.  This past week we have been focusing on finding the main idea in different reading passages so my students were very quick to note the anchor text’s main idea but they had many different versions of the story when they practiced retelling it. I had the Grade 10s retell the story using a very simple table that our grade 2 buddies will use when they retell the story using the Livescribe pen.

The Grade 2 students will draw what happens in the story using the Livescribe pen and it will simultaneously record their writing and their oral retelling. Last Wednesday, my students practiced retelling the first two pages of the story during our Livescribe pen introductory class.  Enthusiasm seems to be on the rise– my students really like the  anchor text and have expressed excitement about their role as mentor.

Many of the students in my class have only been exposed to rubrics and rubric language this year in my class–for some students today was the first time they have co-created criteria.    Surprisingly, a few were not even familiar with the approaching, meeting and exceeding expectations language.   Today we discussed the following criteria: Characters, Setting, Problem and Solution and used only a 3 point scale (not yet meeting, approaching and meeting expectations ).  It was exciting to listen to the students discuss who were the main characters and what characters must be included in the retelling categories. My students quickly figured out (own their own) that starting at the meeting expectations might be an easier way to create the rubric as they could then work backwards with less description in  the other two categories.  As one young man stated, ” The retelling would probably be really basic in the not yet meeting category so if we fill in what we know as the meeting or even add an exceeding expectation category we could work our way backwards.”

My struggling readers and writers are so smart!