I was pretty clueless on how to prepare kids to write an extended response for reading (well math too, but that's a separate story, see below for a few details on that). Thankfully, I have a wonderful teammate who shared every tip she had in her toolbox, and I also spent a lot of time Googling more advice and also just brainstorming my own ideas.
In the end, I was incredibly proud of how well my students wrote extended responses to reading passages, and so I figured I will share what ended up working so well for us.
The format we use is as follows (and there is a student example at the bottom of the post)
* Intro: Put the question in your answer
* Reason one - state your first reason
- Text support (In the text ...)
- Your ideas (I think ...)
(Repeat for reason two and three)
* Conclusion - quick wrap-it-up sentence
That format is relatively standard, nothing fancy about it ... and at the beginning, this was less than successful. I would check paper after paper that all had some part or another missing. It didn't matter how many times I explained it, or how many examples we did as a class, they still left parts out.
So -- what really saved my kids was using COLORS! We underlined the intro and conclusion in black, all the reasons in blue, the text support in green, and the personal ideas in red. They weren't allowed to use the colors on the actual test day, but by that time, it was all so routine for them, that they did great even without the colors!
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