The+Six+Traits+of+Writing+Through+Webquests+by+Whitney+Henkel

Whitney Henkel - Lesson Plan

Teaching 6 Traits of Writing through Webquests

**Teaching Standard: ** Language Arts 9th Grade Standard 2, Objective 3 · (Revision and Editing): Revise and edit to strengthen ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions.

**Introductions: ** Since the assignment requires students to work with the web, I’ll begin the lesson by using some of the tools from my I-Safe certification to teach the students about safety on the internet in regards to good websites to use, viruses and malicious software and how to accurately cite to give credit to whatever sources they get their information from.

After this I will give a quick lecture on the Six Traits of Writing (Ideas, Organization, Voice, Conventions, Word Choice and Sentence Fluency). I will talk about each individual trait for about ten to fifteen minutes. For each trait, I plan on explaining what exactly it is and then provide some examples to show them how it is used within a piece of writing.

**In Class Assignment: ** For the first part of the assignment, I will break all the students up into six groups. Each of the groups will receive one of the Six Traits and working as a group they will create a webquest for the trait that they receive. They will be given the criteria that the websites need to have multiple pieces of information in them and they will need to be legitimate sources. Once all the webquests have been completed, the groups will complete the webquests of the other groups. The goal of this is to give the students a new fun way to learn about the Six Traits of writing.

The second part of the assignment will be used to evaluate how much information the students learned from completing the multiple webquests. In order to show this, I will give the students a paragraph and ask them to do various activities that would demonstrate an understanding of the Six Traits. For example, I would have them correct any grammar mistakes, explain how the thoughts and sentences in the paragraph are organized, have them comment on what ideas the paragraph attempts to convey and finally, have them talk a little about how the choice of the words in the paragraph help to convey the message of the writing.

**Homework: ** For homework, I will have the students, once the webquests are complete, write two paragraphs. The first paragraph will be one in which none of the traits are used correctly. The second paragraph will be the corrected version of the first paragraph. In being able to write both the wrong and right versions, the students will show that they fully comprehend the Six Traits and how to use them in their writing.


 * An example of a webquest that could be created by a student can be found at **Convention Webquest.