Reading and Writing Achievement Standards Curriculum

The Writer
Rationale for Appropriate Achievement
Snowflake
Content
• selects a specific topic – life as a snowflake
• includes a series of related ideas pertaining to how a snowflake is formed and demonstrating thought
about the activities of a snowflake (e.g., One sekind I was a raindrop .…, …shovoled me up…!)
• includes relevant details to expand the ideas (e.g., …I heard someone yell it is snowing outside.)
Organization
• decides upon a purpose and selects an appropriate form, creative narrative, to personify a snowflake
• has a beginning that orients the reader to an imaginative experience (e.g., If I was a snowflake)
• presents ideas in a logical order, although some connections may not be clear (e.g., the following
statement is confusing because it appears before the reader makes the raindrop connection: one day I
would be struk by coldness.)
• links ideas with a variety of simple ordering and connecting words and phrases (e.g., when, and, then,
after)
• begins to group ideas but does not demonstrate conventional paragraph form
• includes an engaging conclusion which makes the reader empathize with a snowflake and therefore
accomplishes the purpose
Word Choice
• includes a few precise or interesting words or phrases with some repetition (e.g., struk, One sekind, the
next sekind)
• includes some descriptive vocabulary (e.g., hugeomugo)
Voice
• shows awareness of audience according to purpose (e.g., including many events in the snowflake’s
story that would be familiar to the reader, shovelling snow, buiding a fort, the excitement of children
when they see the first snowfall)
• demonstrates general knowledge of, and interest in, subject (e.g., captures the snowflake experience)
• conveys personal style (e.g., There I was in that piell)
Sentence Structure
• includes mostly complete sentence types and structures – simple, compound, and an attempt at
complex (e.g., After it stoped snowing the kid that yelled it is snowing, came out with other kids.)
• includes sentences that vary in length and beginnings (e.g., And then all of a sudin.…, When they.…)
Conventions
• uses correct end punctuation in most sentences
• uses commas for a pause in a complex sentence
• includes the correct use of capital letters for proper nouns, first word in sentences, and the pronoun “I”
• spells most high-frequency words correctly (problems with: were, threw and another); sometimes
rearranges letters (shovle) and spells phonetically and with patterns (e.g., piell, sekind)
• generally follows “basic” subject/verb agreement
Achievement Standards End of Grade 3 45