The Drawbridge PEE Paragraph activity brings together all of the learning that has taken place so far.  The beginning of the lesson should be run in a similar fashion to Alligator River.  However, the main difference now is that students are ranking characters, not from best to worst, but from most to least responsible for the death of the Baroness.

Additionally, this time their support must come in the form of a specific quotation, including the line number(s) the quotation is found on.

English Course Pack: Unit One – Literacy Skills

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1.04: The Drawbridge: PEE Paragraphs

Step One: Reading and Ranking

The beginning of this activity should be run the same way as you ran the Alligator River assignment. Start by providing students pages 1 and 2 of the assignment package.

Then:

• Read the story once
• Let the students know they’ll rank the characters from most to least responsible for the baroness’s death
• Read the story again (faster)
• Allow students time to rank characters
• Create new rankings with elbow partners
• Create larger groups to create another combined list
• Discuss the final combined lists as a class

Step Two: The Paragraph Template

After discussing their rankings, students should be provided with pages 3 and 4 from the assignment.  This provides a paragraph template that can walk them through what their PEE might look like, building from the skills they learned during the PEE / Embedding Quotations Slide Deck.

Students do not need to stick with this template, and should be encouraged to use a less formulaic way to express their ideas. However, this does ensure all three parts are included, and it matches with the exemplar that is provided.

Step Three: Explaining the Rubrics

Once students understand what they need to do, and where they need to record their response, you can provide page 5 which is the rubric for the task.

This rubric links to specific expectations in both the Reading and Writing strands of the Ontario English curriculum.  This can be quickly modified for any curriculum, or the specific expectation numbers can be removed to place it strongly within the Common Core curriculum.

The Impact

Students will be encouraged to consider the prompting questions that will help bridge the gap between the language of the curriculum documents, and the specific relevance to the task at hand. They will now have written a PEE paragraph, and used quotations for support. These quotations will have been cited through the in-text line numbers, which will be built upon in future in-text citations through page numbers.

Teachers will also have strong evidence of students’ writing abilities, as well as their ability to infer, connect ideas, and select main and supporting details.

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English – Unit One: Literacy Skills

English Course Packs: Full Units

Unit One: Literacy Skills
Unit Two: Poetry (In Progress)
Unit Three: Literature Circles (In Progress)
Unit Four: Creative Writing & Choose Our Way Tales (In Progress)
Unit Five: Essay Writing (In Progress)
Unit Six: Culminating Tasks (In Progress)

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