Cobb County Elementary Schools

Informational Writing Photostory

Dana Zhun‘s 5^th grade writing students at Lewis Elementary created a PhotoStory documentary on the steps to produce their informational writing pieces. This fantastic PhotoStory would be great to share with students prior to beginning an informational study… and is a great visual for teachers too.

If you don’t have PhotoStory installed on your computer, you can get it for free at by clicking here.  Go to this website and follow the directions for downloading.  It should take less than 3 minutes.

Idea for adding closure to Student Papers

Are you looking for some ideas on how students can add a sense of closure to their papers? This author compares how student writing should end to the last episode of Lost. She provides some excellent insight as to how satisfying conclusions are written.

Click here to read

Putting pen to paper turns prosperous for Vickery Creek Elementary student

Ten-year old Sarah Voskamp of Cumming, Ga is a published author!  She has written a book called Filly Girls, a story about a group of girls who work to reinstate a horseback riding competition.  Click here to read the story of how Sarah wrote her first book.

Cybrary Man’s Educational Web Sites

Wow! This site has assembled over 20,000 resources for parents, students, educators, and general interest. There are links and activities for a variety of subjects – and even a section of Smart Board notebooks. Of special interest at this time are Dr. Suess’ birthday celebration ideas, President’s Day, vocabulary, digital storytelling, and so many others. The site is so large you may want to scroll down and do a search for what you need. You could also click on Educators and Language Arts to find many wonderful resources.

Click Here to visit

Writing Asssessment Scoring Information

Download the documents in a .zip format below

Grade 3 Documents
Grade 5 Documents

ELA Writing Assessment Toolbox

ELA Writing Assessment Toolbox

Second Grade Student Friendly Writing Rubrics

Second Grade Student Friendly Writing Rubrics

Balanced Literacy Classroom Look Fors and Ask Abouts

Click here to view the document.

2010-2011 Writing Fair Information

Cobb County Writing Fair

Please remind all of the upcoming Writing Fair, which:

* encourages students at each local school to write in any genre and to follow the complete writing process to publish their writing;

* involves a team in judging student writing submitted at the local school to identify one winner per grade level;

* receives school winners from each participating school which are sent to the County (1 entry per grade level, K – 5) for a second judging;

* identifies one winner from each grade level K – 12 to be submitted for competition in the state-level Georgia Young Authors Writing Competition.

An excellent way to showcase your hard work and the writing proficiency of your students is to enter the Cobb County School District Writing Fair.  The 2010-11 Cobb County Writing Fair Brochure  and Pamphlet detailing guidelines, the district scoring rubric, and entry form are attached.  Please distribute this information to the appropriate instructional leaders to coordinate the local school writing fair competition.  Please read and follow the published directions carefully and submit one entry per grade level to the county office, Curriculum and Instruction, attention Deborah Chester, on or before March 11, 2011.  A completed entry form must accompany each entry (see attached).  Entries that are received on or before the due date will be judged to determine district level winners.

CCSD Writing Fair Brochure 2010-11

CCSD Writing Fair Entry Form

Writing Fair Pamphlet 2010-11

Writing Fair Top Ten for Curr Briefings and ELA Blog 2010-11

Writing Fair 2010-11 Scoring Rubric

Writing Scores Interpretation Support

As you begin to work with the writing scores, the link to the state site might help:

In addition to many support pieces online at the state site the interpretive guide is at:

Guidelines are as follows:

Each paper is scored by two raters. Raters who score the student compositions are trained to understand and use the standardized scoring system. The raters score each paper independently. Each of the four domains of effective writing is evaluated. Although these domains are interrelated during the writing process, a strength or area of challenge is scored only once under a particular domain. Scores in each domain range from 1 to 5 (5 being the highest score). The total weighted raw scores range from 10 (1’s in all four domains) to 50 (5’s in all four domains). A score of "1 to 5" is assigned to each domain by each rater.

These scores represent a continuum of writing that ranges from inadequate to minimal to good to very good. Points on the continuum are defined by the scoring rubric for each domain. Each score point itself represents a range of papers. Domain scores are combined to obtain a total score for each student. In combining the domain scores, the Content score is given a weight of 40%; the other domains of Organization, Style, and Conventions are given a weight of 20% each. The total score is then converted to a three-digit scaled score. There are three performance levels represented: Does Not Meet (100-199), Meets (200-249), and Exceeds(250+).

Because the 100-250+ is a scale score – there is not an absolute formula to which we have access for calculating the conversion from the 1-5 scores to the scale score. That is done at the state level and is weighted differently based on the performance on the various prompts.