Today you are going to show me how you find the speaker's viewpoint in a poem. Please be sure that you annotate while reading the poem today and also be sure that you use specific details from the text and you must fully explain those text details. Please do not look for the simplest detail. This response takes some thought to receive full points. A break down of the points is provided for you on the formative.
Pass out the Author's Viewpoint Formative Assessment and allow students to begin working. I'm hoping the students can do well with this. Otherwise, I'll be throwing this skill into workstations some more and trying to let the kids practice more during RTI and other spare moments throughout the day. Once I take a look at this, I'll be able to make my groups for the next round of workstations, as well. I'm finding that my students who struggle with concepts like these, are having difficulty overall. This formative is definitely more difficult than the previous formative.
Students will work independently on the assessment. While they work, I will monitor the room, but offer no assistance on this formative. I will ask students where there annotations might be or if they feel like highlighting might be a good idea. I do like to remind them of those strategies on formative pieces, so that they will be used to the expectations when the summatives arrive.
Students usually understand that the speaker likes rain, but it's the explanations that have been weak in the past. Students would choose the obvious line in the poem that says rain is beautiful, but wouldn't explain their thoughts. I've modified the formative to give students the expectations for the response, so I'm hoping I'll see improvement here.