A critical quandary in teaching composition

September 18, 2006 6:15 PM

As a tutor, how do I come up with a critical writing essay prompt that is accessible to students from third to eighth grade?

I work part-time as an English tutor for a private tutoring company where my students attend a one hour session with me each week. One of their assignments is a monthly essay which I help them revise in class. They receive the prompt on the first week of the month, bring in a rough draft on the second week, a revised draft on the third week, and turn in their final draft on the last week. Our essay prompts are broad and categorical: personal, descriptive, expository, etc.

October's topic will be the critical essay, and here I'm a bit stumped on how to write the prompt. The idea, of course, is to teach the students how to engage a text critically, which I expect will be a difficult concept for the younger students to understand. The problem is that this prompt must be stated in a way that is intelligible to the younger students and still engaging for the older ones. Again, I'm dealing with third to eighth grade students.

At first, I planned on including a few selections for them to choose from with the prompt, but this seemed too boring and constricting. Besides, I want to encourage their interest in independent reading. Yet I feel that the students will need guidance in choosing a text, especially since I suspect many of them don't read on their own time at all. Because I can't expect these students to read a novel just for the assignment, I'm thinking that recommending short stories, poems, and maybe also newspaper articles is the way to go. With that said, here's the advice I'm fishing for:

1) Is there a free online resource for short stories or poems aimed at younger readers?
2) Can anyone recommend short stories or poems for this age group that I should mention in the prompt for those willing to make a library trip?
3) I’m just a college student, not a real teacher. Any advice for how to explain critical thinking to little kids is welcome, particularly in getting across the point that criticism is neither a summary nor a love/hate opinion. (To make sure the kids are on track, I plan on asking them only for an outline with critical statements and evidence in lieu of a rough draft on the second week.)

posted by mikelly to education (5 comments total)

Well, if by critical essay you mean you want them to read something and form a point of view about it and back it up with info from the text, I know that in my elementary school the teachers were fond of giving us things like short articles about a community problem and asked us what we thought was right or wrong. In general I would say that community issues are a good idea because they can often be simplified down for younger kids and you can give them a few prompts to think about, and it's easy enough for even 3rd graders to have a simple point of view about the issue. Sometimes small local newspapers have stories that can work, or you can take a news article and trim out irrelevant parts and possibly revise the vocabulary to the kids' level of reading ability. Things that have a connection to the kids' lives or their families might be easier for them to understand than more abstract writing.

Sorry that this is all just my two cents, but good luck finding sources.
posted by muscatlove at 6:45 PM on September 18, 2006

Community issues you might try to find op-eds or articles on, that have clear pro- and con- arguments:
1. Should TV shows be allowed to show violence, or should there be restrictions (for example, on violence that can be shown in kid's shows)? (Or, similar question about video games)
2. Should soda-pop/junk food companies be allowed to pay money to put vending machines in elementary schools?
3. Should the town have a law that says people are required to spay or neuter their pets?

Poems you might try (for a "what does the poem mean, and is it right?" kind of question):
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, or The Road Not Taken
some Emily Dickinson

Other things:
Various of Aesop's Fables or that sort of thing might work. They have lessons embedded (eg, slow and steady wins the race), but you could ask the kids if they can think of a time when the lesson would not apply (eg, when it would be better to go fast).

An article from a popular science magazine might work. Try to find one that doesn't touch any hot buttons -- maybe something about space exploration? How scientists would go about showing that supposed Bigfoot prints are a hoax? Epidemiology -- how do they tell where the source of a disease outbreak is (eg the e coli spinach thing going on right now)?

You could also look at the Teaching Philosophy to Kids site. Some of the stories and prompts there might work.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:43 PM on September 18, 2006

Is there any reason you can’t come up with two prompts, one very simple for the third- to fifth-graders, and one slightly more sophisticated for the sixth- to eighth-graders? I think you’re right that especially for this kind of essay, which is a more difficult concept in general, it would be very hard to come up with something that works for such a wide age range.

In terms of materials to respond to/criticize, I think your first instinct was better. You might consider choosing three texts (maybe one each from three broad categories: newspaper article, poem, short story) for each age group, then allowing each student to choose which of those three s/he wants to write about. That way, you can be sure that they’re working with good material, but that they don’t have to write about something they hate. (You could also offer the option of substituting their own text for one of your choices, subject to your approval. That might remove the “boring/constricting” objection you have.) Kids who don’t do much independent reading will be really lost, I think, as to how to choose something for an assignment that’s going to be difficult, anyway. Also, if you make good selections, you might introduce reluctant readers to something that will inspire them to learn or read more.

The idea, of course, is to teach the students how to engage a text critically, which I expect will be a difficult concept for the younger students to understand.

Yeah, you’re right. I’m not even sure what this means for kids of this age. I’d say that this would be a time to go to your supervisor at the company and ask for the three main goals or components that they expect from an essay of this type.

[Example that I just totally made up: 1. Identify the thesis/goal of the text. 2. Evaluate whether the text is convincing/if it accomplishes the goal. 3. How does it accomplish #2? Cite specific examples from text.]

Given that, you can refine those to explain the concepts to your students. This should give them an idea of how to structure their essay as well as advance notification of what kind of rubric you’ll be using to evaluate their essays.

I hope this was helpful (and that I didn’t miss the point entirely!)—IANATeacher, just someone who works on books for kids.
posted by CiaoMela at 7:23 AM on September 19, 2006

Thanks everyone, especially LobsterMitten. That was very helpful input.

I managed to write a prompt that I think is accessible to everyone. Following Ciao's advice, I broke the task of the essay into three chunks:

(1) Meaning: What is the main idea of the text?
(2) Methods: How does the text get the main idea across to the reader?
(3) Value: Is the text convincing? Does it accomplish its goal? Do you agree with its main idea?

For the older kids, I later noted that not all texts have one, main idea, that, especially in more complicated texts, many meanings of various themes can be extracted from the same text, and that it is important to just focus on one idea.

I decided to allow the students to choose their own text, but I also included two selection sheets they could choose something from.

For the younger kids I included two stories from Aesop's Fables (great suggestion) and recommended "The Giving Tree" and "Frog and Toad" as good library choices. For the older kids, I included two poems, Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (another good suggestion) and "Poems of Our Climate" by Wallace Stevens. To help get them started, I included a few critical thinking questions at the end of each selection.
posted by mikelly at 4:19 PM on September 20, 2006

:) Glad it was helpful; cool question. I'm surprised we don't have more elementary school teachers here.

And thanks for updating with your plan!
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:37 PM on September 20, 2006