Major Project Update #4 - RAFT Writing

Hello again! Finally back from Thanksgiving break and ready to turn the corner for the final stretch of the semester. Picking up where I left off earlier in November, I would like to narrow down the focus of the WebQuest I am developing. The potential avenues I listed last time included:

1. Choose a historical figure and complete a character study
2. Raft writing activity - Students put themselves in the shoes of a historical figure and write from their perspective
3. Analyze historical cause and effect relationships
4. Compare and contrast the perspective of the British with the perspective of the American Colonists
5. Assess the validity of various resources
6. Analyze primary source documents such as posters, newspaper clippings and letters.

Going forward, I will be focusing the development of the WebQuest on exploring the differences in perspective in colonial America, focusing primarily on the differences between the British and the Americans. In order for students to display their understanding of colonial perspective, they will be completing two raft writing exercises, one from the perspective of the British, and the other from the Perspective of the Americans. 

Raft writing, as described here, is a "writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer and how to communicate their ideas so that the audience understands what is written. 
By using this strategy, teachers encourage students to write creatively, to consider a topic from multiple perspectives, and to gain the ability to write for different audiences.RAFT assignments encourage students to uncover their own voices and formats for presenting their ideas about content information they are studying."

Raft Writing stands for: 

• Role of the Writer: Who are you as the writer? A movie star? The President? A plant?

• Audience: To whom are you writing? A senator?  Yourself? A company?

• Format: In what format are you writing? A diary entry? A newspaper?  A love letter?

• Topic: What are you writing about?

The students that I work with at the YMCA Phoenix program do not usually love writing assignments, but they do respond fairly well to RAFT writing. They enjoy thinking creatively and making up their own narratives, so I think that the RAFT writing activity will work well in the context of developing historical colonial perspectives for my WebQuest.