Writing with Colors

This year, my standardized test scores were pretty good. I had some seriously high growth, especially in ELA. My kids all totally kicked BUTT on the open response questions, which I think made a huge difference. How'd they do it? Well- I really think it was a professional development course I went to last year called writing with colors.  The concept is simple- color code your writing to make sure that you have hit all the important points! Here is the quick and dirty of what we learned about.

To start off, the topic sentence of your writing is pink. It seems simple, but so many of my kiddos simply didn't understand the concept of a topic sentence. They thought saying "I am going to tell you about polar bears" was acceptable. Um, no. Turning the question into a statement or PQA (put the question in the answer) is an easy way for all kids to be able to succeed in this area. Equally as often, they just jump into the meat of it and forget to include it at all.  To make sure they don't forget it, they highlight the topic sentence in pink.

Is it just me, or does anyone else have kiddos that love to ramble? No sequence or transition words, they just go, and go, and go.... 

Starting to get into the meat of it! Quotes or other paraphrased text evidence are highlighted in green. You also use this color while reading the text to highlight the information you plan to use for the open response. Keeping one uniform color for the text highlighting is helpful to see how accurately the kids are highlighting, too. Once the kiddos are writing the response, the text they quote directly is highlighted in green as well. 

Explanations of the quotes are BLUE. This color is also used in annotating the text, but is a little bit tricky. After you highlight the text in green, you write WHY you chose to include a quote in the margin of the text. Why is it important? What makes this bit of text relevant? After it's written, you highlight it in blue. Once you are on to the open response writing, you highlight the explanations in blue as well. 

This one is my favorite! The magic color is for whatever "magic" you want the kids to focus on. For me, I don't change mine up. It's always the SIM starters, which we use to explain text evidence. They are:
This shows that...
This is important because...
This means that...

I think this was the game changer for my kiddos. They were pretty good about selecting the text they needed to reference to prove their thinking, but they had a difficult time remembering to explain the quote. The SIM starters have been the game changer for them! The secret formula for us has been:

topic sentence
transition
SIM starter
evidence
explanation
transition
SIM starter
evidence
explanation
transition
SIM starter
evidence
explanation/conclusion


Once the response is all written, it comes out looking a bit like this...

I wish I could give you a link to a PD book or course you could take, but I couldn't find anything! All the credit goes to the Writing with Colors people (whose names I do not know) because this fabulous idea is all theirs. Enjoy!