Assessment permeates every moment of our teaching.

As we plan a year-long curriculum and again as

we plan each unit we must be mindful of what many of our young students can do easily, of what they
can do with just a little leg-up from us, and of the diversity of writers in our care. Our teaching is
always an interaction between what our students can do and the goals we have in mind for them.
Those goals grow out of our beliefs about what matters most, our experiences traveling along similar
paths with other learners, and they grow out of the standards we adopt. I was one of the many
authors of the standards New York City adopted, the New Primary Literacy Standards, and so it is not a
coincidence that our yearlong curriculum is in synchronization with those standards, developed by the
National Center on Education and Economics and by the Learning, Research and Development Center
at the University of Pittsburgh. They can be ordered though www.ncee.org.

Each unit is designed with goals in mind that are aligned to the New Standards:

1
 x M o n i t o r i n g C h i l d re n ’s P ro g re s s
Assessment Rubric for Writing for Readers: Teaching Skills and Strategies x R e c o r d i n g Yo u r T e a c h i n g

1 2 3 4 5
Attitude By the end of this unit, the child assumes the identity of “I’m the kind of kid who can write in ways that others can read.” She believes that with hard work,
she can do whatever is necessary to make her writing readable. By the end of the unit, with encouragement, she takes on the goal of writing readably as a personal mission.
Meanwhile the child continues to believe she can write Small Moment stories and does so with some confidence.
Planning The child chooses topics, and appropriate paper, and plans out her stories with increasing independence.
By the end of the unit, she juggles concerns for both content and convention as she writes, switching from microconcern for recording letters to global concern for the whole
message she is trying to convey. She also switches from a forward-moving process of writing to a reflexive process of rereading. She may relegate some concerns until later,
muttering to herself, “I will just spell it that way for now—later I’ll fix it.” Then again, she might say, “Wait. My alphabet chart [or my word list] can help with that.”
Independence The child independently generates and produces personal narratives, accesses supplies, decides when pieces are done, begins new pieces, etc., without needing
the teacher’s instructional focus on this work.
The child begins to assume some responsibility for writing more conventionally. She has a repertoire of strategies that she initiates and uses independently in order to spell
“hard” words so that others can read them. (These strategies are listed under graphophonics.)
Genre The child generates her own topics for true stories and draws a series of pictures across pages as a vehicle for planning stories that span several
pages. These may continue to be Small Moment stories, although now that the teacher isn’t vigilantly reminding writers of the importance of focus, it could be
that the writing becomes less detailed. In any case, the child writes narratives that contain at least two appropriately-sequenced events that readers can reconstruct.
Purpose The child writes to communicate meaning and more specifically to share stories, understanding that writing with conventions is a tool for the larger purpose of writing
for readers. She wants others to read her writing and understands that if she works hard and resourcefully, she can give readers what they need in order to do so.
Productivity The child works productively during writing workshop, although the rate at which she produces pieces will probably slow down as she works to make her pieces
readable. If this is a four-week-long unit, she writes and edits approximately 8 personal narratives during the unit, each spanning 3–4 pages.
The actual writing the child does on each of those pages will vary depending on the child’s proficiency, but most kindergarteners write a sentence on each page, and most first
graders, a few sentences on each page. Second graders should be considerably more fluent.
Graphophonics The child shows dramatic progress in her ability to spell conventionally, becoming more skilled and resourceful as a speller, using both strategies and information
to construct words and sentences that she and others can read.
Progress may mean learning to segment oral language into words, syllables, or phonemes; to write left to right, top to bottom; or to leave spaces between words. Progress may
mean using upper- and lowercase letters correctly. By the end of the unit, the child can say a word slowly, isolate and listen to the sounds she hears (which may just be initial and
final sounds), record those sounds, reread the portion of the word that is on the page, and then voice, record, and reread the next sound. If a child’s writing hasn’t become more
conventional as the year has progressed, this should sound alarms.
Kindergarteners (and first graders who have not had a background in literacy) should by the end of this unit write in such a way that a literate adult can read stretches of the
child’s writing; the child should also be able to do this, matching each spoken word with a written word and initiating self-corrections.
Writing Process The child plans for writing, drafts, rereads, and edits independently. Specifically, the child begins to reread her writing often and for many purposes, including remembering
what she has written in order to add on. She often rereads with pen in hand, making adjustments that can help readers. If she is just learning to write readable texts, she pauses
in the midst of writing to think, “Have I put down as many sounds as I could?” or “Have I left spaces between my words?”
Qualities of The child does not make new strides forward this month in learning qualities of good writing. In fact, the quality of her texts probably
Good Writing suffers from her new focus on conventions.
Language The child builds her repertoire of easily recognized sight words and learns to spell these words with automaticity when she writes. She uses these words as anchors to help
(High-Frequecy Words) her reread her writing. The child’s growing repertoire of sight words becomes a resource that she uses to spell unknown words. The child learns that a good speller relies not
only on the sounds of words but also on analogies to other known words, thinking, “Is this like other words that I already know how to spell?” She knows that
a speller also relies on visual memory of a word and tests what she’s written against her mental image of that word by asking, “Does that look right?”
Reading The child welcomes the chance to be her own first reader, and when she rereads her writing, she pays precise attention to exactly what is on the page, often pointing at each
word. If her one-to-one matching is still unstable, she points under her words as she reads them, learning to match and self-correct. She uses strategies (including looking
at the picture to recall the content and calling on letter-sound knowledge) to help her decipher her own words. The child’s progress in writing probably leads and supports her
progress in reading. If she has not already learned one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written words, her writing helps enormously with this. She also learns to
rely on initial, medial, and final sounds, to recognize high-frequency words, to use word chunks, to hold onto meaning while working with letters and sounds, and to be a
resourceful and active problem solver.

May be copied for single classroom use. ©2003 by Lucy Calkins and Beth Neville, from Resources for Primary Writing, Units of Study for Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum, Lucy Calkins, Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH 2