Alignment to Assessment Standards and Purpose of Lesson

• Work Time A: Students complete the End of Unit 2 Assessment. They revise and explain their pronoun use in the narrative letter they wrote in the previous lesson, as well as make revisions to improve sentence variety and meaning. There is also an alternative assessment that uses a sample letter and that can be used with or without the revision as needed. (W.6.5 option 1 only, L.6.1a, L.6.1c, L.6.1d, L.6.3a)
• In this lesson, students focus on working to become effective learners by reading and answering questions independently for the end of unit assessment. Prompt students' perseverance by reminding them that assessments are meant to inform instruction. Use assessment data to make choices about what should be retaught and how to adjust the pacing. Encourage students not to be afraid of mistakes; an accurate assessment is crucial for tailoring lessons to students' needs.

Opportunities to Extend Learning

• Some students may not need extensive review of the assessment directions. Release them to begin working on the assessment while clarification is provided to other students who need more support.
• Proficient writers may finish early or determine that they have not used any pronouns incorrectly. Challenge these students to go back to make other revisions, such as adding more textual evidence, additional reasons to support their claim, or clearer transitions. Students may also continue practicing with the recording tool they will use for the End of Unit 3 assessment.

How It Builds on Previous Work

• In the second half of this unit, students finished Two Roads and collected evidence to write the narrative letter from Cal to Possum. Students also continued to engage in instruction about pronouns and sentence variety. This lesson continues those routines in an assessment, asking students to apply their learning to their own revisions or revisions on a sample letter.

Support All Students

• Independently completing writing tasks during assessments can be challenging for slower writers. By contrast, this end of unit assessment requires that students use class time to edit and revise a piece they have already written. This assessment gives students time to consider their writing at the word- and sentence-level, which is especially critical for ELLs. ▲
• Encourage students who might benefit from additional visual support to color-code the revisions they make to their narratives.
• If students receive accommodations for assessments, communicate with the cooperating service providers regarding the practices of instruction in use during this study, as well as the goals of the assessment.
• For some students, this assessment may require more than the 30 minutes allotted. Consider providing time over multiple days if necessary.

Assessment Guidance

• All assessment materials (student and teacher versions of Revise Narrative Writing for Pronoun Use and Sentence Variety) are included in the Assessment Overview and Resources.
• Though it is limited in scope, the narrative-revision assessment will provide enough evidence of student data to plan additional instructional support and later assessment for students who need more. Another option has been provided: End of Unit 2 Assessment: Selected Response Questions: Pronoun Use and Sentence Variety. This optional assessment uses passages from Two Roads with which students answer selected response questions about correct pronoun use and constructed response questions about sentence variety. Use this optional assessment instead of or in addition to the narrative-revision assessment to provide more data about student progress toward the standards. This decision can be made for the whole class or for individual students as appropriate, and the two versions can also be given at the same time or at different times as warranted by student needs.
• Since this assessment is focused solely on language standards, which are not priority standards that are tracked, students do not track progress as they normally do during assessment lessons. Students will record the narrative letter writing on the Writing Record and reflect on their experience of the assessment in the closing instead.

Down the Road

• In the next lesson, students will begin work on the literary argument essay by analyzing a model. The work they complete leading to the narrative letter writing is additional preparation, specifically evidence collection, for the argument essay.
• Students’ End of Unit 2 Assessments will be returned in Unit 3, Lesson 8 with feedback.