Summer Writing for 4th and 5th Graders

The AAPS has set up three prompts for 2007-08 fourth and fifth grade students to respond to with MyAccess this summer. All prompts are active from June 16th through August 22nd and are set up for unlimited submissions for all 4th and 5th grade students who have active MyAccess licenses.

The first two prompts, Top Vacation Place and Sports Teams, are scored intellimetrically. The third prompt, Personal Narrative, is an Ann Arbor Public Schools MyPrompt and will only receive a holistic score.

Here is some information about the prompts:

Top Vacation Place
Choose a favorite place you like to visit or go to on vacation and write an essay that convinces students your age to visit that place. Remember to give reasons why your readers should travel to the place you picked.


Sports Teams
Both boys and girls play sports at school. Some students feel that boys and girls should play on the same team, while other students feel it is better for boys and girls to be on different teams. Do you think it is a good idea to have boys and girls on the same team or do you think that boys and girls should play on different teams?

Write an essay that convinces your school principal that girls and boys should or should not play on the same team.


Personal Narrative
Identify an important moment in your life. Describe the experience for your readers. Your memoir should include a problem in the introduction as a way of introducing tension. You should describe characters and setting. It will also be helpful to include dialogue and inner dialogue. Your personal narrative should try to "show not tell" in one or two important moments. Finally, you should resolve the problem that you set forth in your introduction within the conclusion of your personal narrative. Remember, writing personal narrative, or memoir, is writing about a single moment or event in your life and writing well.

Click here for technical requirements for MyAccess.

4th Grade Open House/Music Night - 5/15 @ 6:30 PM

We're looking forward to seeing all of our wonderful 4th grade families for the annual Open House and Music Night at MLK this Thursday, May 15 beginning at 6:30 PM.

Hope to see you there!

PTO-Sponsored Writing Workshop for the 3rd and 4th Grades: “Poetry in the Wild”

Get your pencils sharpened…
This 5-week writing workshop is led by Carolyn Berge, a former AAPS teacher and a current professor of writing at EMU, who specializes in “Writing for Elementary Teachers”. Students will examine nature, gather observations, and use their creativity to explore exciting writing projects. At the end of the workshop, the writings will be published in a King community online journal.

The workshop will be held on Wednesdays from 4:00 to 5:00 pm starting on March 12th and ending on April 16th (no workshop on Feb. 27 during break week), at King School. On April 16 we invite parents and friends to a reading of the students' work.

This workshop is PTO sponsored and free of charge to families. The number of participants will be limited to 40 students from the 3rd and 4th grades. We will fill the available slots on a first come-first serve basis. Registration forms will come home the week of March 3rd. Questions – please contact Camille Ziolek acziolek@oaklandcc.edu or Alisha Faciane affenty@umich.edu.