Writing in grades 6-8

Students write daily in the Amplify Science middle school units. Student writing exemplifies many of the different purposes for writing in science. Students annotate articles, evidence cards, and diagrams; write short answers to questions; write to explain their own diagrams and models; and engage in longer writing activities to support a claim.,

Students annotate often, whether it is for articles they read or textual evidence sources they examine. Annotation is an extremely useful skill for all disciplines, but it has a very important role in the science classroom (and for scientists). Science texts and data are often complex and research shows that annotation is an important way for a reader to stop and think carefully about what they are reading. As addressed in the discussion of Active Reading above, annotations also provide a record of students’ thinking, so that they can revisit a text and use their annotations to recapture their thinking. Additionally in science, visual representations are crucial for understanding and communicating about science ideas. Amplify Science units encourage students to annotate visual representations to help them understand what each is communicating.

Annotating is only one of many examples of informal ways that writing is authentically and purposefully added to every unit. For instance, students begin each day with a Warm-Up, which; almost always ask students to write their thinking about an important content idea for that lesson. Students write responses and summarizing texts at the conclusion of many activities as well.

The most conspicuous kind of writing that students participate in for the Amplify Science middle school units, however, is the writing of scientific arguments or explanations. Students use content from the unit, as well as specific data sources, to write complete arguments several times in each unit. Specifically, students always write an argument or explanation about the content and unit context they have been considering when they reach the end of Chapter 3, then write a longer, complete scientific argument at the end of Chapter 4. Often, they are provided with more opportunities than this, as well.

Students’ argumentation writing is scaffolded in many significant ways. For example, for units where Reasoning is a focus, the Reasoning Tool was conceived of as a scaffold for supporting students in thinking about and identifying the reasoning that would be needed to make a convincing argument. In these Reasoning-focused units, students examine the evidence they are provided for their argument, then use the Reasoning Tool to express and extract the reasoning that would support their argument, before beginning to write. In addition to the support offered with the Reasoning Tool, students are supplied with resources like sentence starters and word banks that they can use when writing.