What does “grade level” writing look like for kindergarten, first, and second grades?

What does “grade level” writing look like?

 Are you confused about how to assess student writing? The Common Core standards don’t help much since many of them are vague and general.

After 20 years of trial and error in designing a writing program for 5–8-year-olds, I have come up with some simple performance standards that focus on key writing skills.

To begin with, it is important to know where you want students to be at the end of the year, so you can create a roadmap for instruction. Keeping the end goal in mind will help you to focus your instruction on the skills that matter most in teaching kids to write.

The performance standards below are based on some of the clearer CC standards as well as a little bit of current research about explicit instruction in writing. There is very little research to go on.

These standards that I have come up with are based on my experience, and would need more research scrutiny and a wider sample of kids to be considered “normed” (not being a trained researcher, I’m not sure how all that works). However, I think they are better, simpler, and more practical than anything I have seen and used. And, yes, I believe that standards are important for accountibility in our teaching.

End of year kindergarten performance standards

By the end of the year, kindergarteners should be able to:

Write a complete idea (structured as a sentence but may not include punctuation) that includes…

·      Mostly lower-case letters that are easily legible

·      Spaces between words

·      Words that can be easily deciphered by the reader

End of year first grade performance standards

By the end of the year, first graders should be able to:

Write 5-6 sentences that include…

·      Legible handwriting and good spacing

·      One or more sentences with a conjunction

(i.e. “because”, “but”, “and”, “so”)

·      One or more sentences that begin differently

than the others

·      Periods where they belong (no run-on sentences)

·      Sentences starting with capital letters

·      Correct spelling of many common words

End of year second grade performance standards

By the end of the year, second graders should be able to:

In 10 minutes (after a 5 minute brainstorm period), write 5-6 sentences that include…

·      Legible handwriting, spacing, and letter sizing on

notebook paper

·      Details of who, what, where, when, and why

·      Several sentences with prepositional phrases 

·      Capitalization of proper nouns

·      Most common words spelled correctly

The end of the year assessments are my teacher report card. If I have worked hard to teach writing skills, then 75-85% of my class should be able to meet these standards.

Assessments, including all of those given during the year, are really to inform our teaching and to inform our kids of their progress.

If you want more information, including examples of student work, here’s the link to my video. You can learn to see in just a minute or two where each student is in their writing skills. No need for a complicated writing assignment and big rubric, or any number or grading system.

You can also check out the Growing Writers Scope and Sequence to see how Growing Writers teaches these skills step by step in a school year. This will help you work backwards to see where students should ideally be at various points.

And if you purchase Growing Writers, your assessments during the year will be a piece of cake! Each workbook has a built-in assessment designed to see if students have mastered what was taught in that workbook. So easy!

 Teaching the Growing Writers program as it is written will guarantee that 75-85% of your class will meet these performance standards. If all K-2 teachers at your school use the program, the cumulative effect of those three years will be huge.