Because Mary did the pre-assessment for me, I had already done VTS with these students and I was surprised at the vast difference between the discussion we had and what they had written. In the classroom, it seemed like most students were eager to participate and had multiple well-grounded observations to contribute, but their pre-assessments did not represent this at all. They seemed to be writing the bare minimum they thought they could get away with. Many of them simply wrote some version of: "I see men fishing. They are in a boat with a net." I am curious if their writing skills are on par with other 4th and 5th graders because I found their spelling and handwriting to be difficult to read at times. It seems like they should know at this point to leave spaces in between words and be able to spell "boat" but most of them couldn't.
I saw many of Housen's characteristic, "ideosyncratic and imaginative" Stage 1 responses:
"war, because people don't wear metal hats when there fishing or doing something"
"also it looks like the first man is trying build something like hammering down a piece of wood, like there is a hole in the boat"
"I see a tiger with a dark coat I looks like it is triying to clime on the boat."
There was a wide range of word counts, from 13 to 70, but they were generally around the 25 word mark, and included 2 or 3 assertions. I'm really curious to see how they improve at the end of the semester!
I'd love to tell you that expressive AND mechanical issues will be resolved by these students during your field experience with me, but as you can probably guess, this will not be the case. Because of mechanics and conventions struggles, I suspect that many were just playing it safe at best; at worst, doing the minimum they needed to get by! Of course, group process and Vygotsky's ZPD are also at play when you witness discussion that are much richer than their writing. We'll see how they do. This will be interesting to watch!
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