![]() ![]() So, my advice is to give them a good foundation for how to write them and then sprinkle them in now and then throughout the year. It would be like asking them to write a five-paragraph essay each day. I try not to burn kids out on any one thing so that they dread it.Constructed responses are somewhat of a chore, even with an excellent strategy like RACE.You’ll want students to write constructed responses repeatedly, but NOT for every passage they read.Giving students practice with shorter texts will help them gain confidence for the longer texts in the future. If you teach this strategy right before standardized testing, it will not be very effective. Make sure to start teaching the RACE strategy early in the year, so there’s plenty of time to practice.After that, it is time to work on it independently. ![]() When students are finished, we go over it together to compare notes when they’re finished. The next day, we repeat this with a different passage in pairs. I project it on the smartboard so everyone can see it. It might be a Scholastic News article, a page from Chicken Soup for the Soul, or a passage I’ve created.įinally, I model (with their input) a Constructed Response using a RACE template from The Teacher Next Door’s Text Evidence Differentiated Unit To do this, we read a short text as a class. Once I’ve taught all of the components, it’s time for students to practice putting it all together. The Explaining part goes pretty quickly after that. Then, I move to Citing text evidence, which takes much longer to teach. I teach the Restating and Answering together since they usually form one sentence. Students aren’t doing constructed responses yet, but most are fairly comfortable with restating a question.īecause of this, I might spend a few days teaching or reviewing the restating and answering part. Then, I break it down into separate parts and teach each one before putting it all together.īy the time kids reach my fourth or fifth-grade class, most students at my school have had teachers who have required them to answer a question using a restatement. When I teach the RACE strategy, I give the kids an overview of a completed constructed response example, so they can see where we’re going. Here are a few examples of sentence starters that help students begin to Explain: The last part of the Constructed Response is where kids tell how their text evidence proves their point.Īgain, some simple sentence starters help kids stay on track here. I make sure students know to quote the text exactly as it is written and use quotation marks correctly too. Once kids memorize a few question stems, this part of the RACE strategy goes much more smoothly. To teach this skill, I make an anchor chart with the question stems and put them up when we start to work on citing evidence. Then, they must write it correctly using a sentence stem Sometimes questions have more than one part.ģ) They need to list the character’s name before using a pronoun like he/she/they.įirst, kids need to find relevant evidence to support their answer. Students may use their knowledge and inferences from the text to identify the answer.ġ) Students must answer the specific question being asked.Ģ) Students also need to answer every part of the question. Students need to remove the question word like who, what, when, where, or why and then restate the keywords.įor example, if the question was, “Why did Jill decide to give her mother a jewelry box?” the answer would start this way, “Jill decided to give her mother a jewelry box because.”Īfter restating the question, the second step is to finish the sentence and answer the question. This is also known as restating the question. The first step is to change the question into a statement. So, just what is the RACE strategy? RACE is an acronym that helps students remember which steps and in which order to write a constructed response. The RACE Strategy gave me a step-by-step template to teach my students precisely what to do.Įven though writing constructed responses are still challenging, when you teach your students the RACE strategy and give them lots of opportunities for practice, your students will master it! ![]() It took the fright out of teaching constructed responses for text evidence. Since we know that students need to be able to write constructed responses, I was so happy when I was introduced to the RACE strategy. ![]() I mean, when you compare writing a constructed response to answering a multiple-choice question, well, there really is no contest.Ĭonstructed Response makes multiple-choice questions seem so simple to complete. How to Teach Constructed Response Using the RACE StrategyĬonstructed response questions can be scary at first. Scary to teach and scary to write! Using the RACE Strategy will help ensure students get this skill right, every time! ![]()
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