Understanding CraftPlus Writing and Instructional Levels

Writing Levels. At the beginning of each year you’ll determine the level of your students’ writing with a CraftPlus assessment tool. This information will help you differentiate instruction to meet the needs of individual students. The CraftPlus genre tiers in Section 3 provide Target Skill application across the Initial, Developing, Fluent, and Fluent Plus writing levels.

• Initial writers are making, or have made, the oral-to-written connection.  They understand that what they say can be written for an audience or themselves to read.  They eventually write a few related sentences, but they often start a sentence in the same way over and over. These writers learn to write a beginning and ending and use basic composing skills in their pieces.  Initial writers are approximately grade K-1 students.

• Developing writers are more comfortable writing several ideas based on a topic.  They can include beginnings and endings in their pieces and make an attempt to vary sentence structure.  These writers begin to use composing and literary skills to engage the reader. Developing writers are approximately grade 2-3 students.

•  Fluent writers are capable of writing developed multi-paragraphed pieces with beginnings and endings.  They use many composing skills and strive for varied sentence structure.  They are capable of writing more genres, including persuasion and comparison.  Fluent writers are approximately grade 4-5 students. 

• Fluent Plus writers write developed multi-paragraphed genre pieces that have logic and flow.  They use composing skills and literary devices to convey meaning and style as well as to set the tone of the piece.  This most sophisticated writer engages the reader fully.  Fluent Plus writers are approximately middle-school students. 

The level at which a child can write is affected by cognitive development, prior exposure to writing-craft instruction, and natural aptitude.  You will very likely find that the next class you teach will come to your grade writing at a higher level because students will have had more exposure to explicit writing-craft instruction.

Instructional Levels.  The CraftPlus levels are specific to each grade. The levels of Awareness, Instructional and Mastery (AIM) represent the year-end expectations for teaching those Target Skills in your grade. You can find them on the Grade-Level Quarterly Marking Period Instructional Record in Section 3.

CraftPlus Target Skills spiral in difficulty over the K-8 years. Many skills repeat from year to year. The curriculum sets out your instructional level responsibilities so that the teacher at the following level can develop it further. For example, the techniques of beginning a piece with a question, exclamation, and onomatopoeia are Initial writing level Target Skills for both kindergarten and first grade. Kindergarten teachers make the kindergarteners aware of these techniques. First-grade teachers instruct the Target Skill because the students are expected to use the beginning techniques in their writing. The Target Skill is the same: the level of instruction and student expectations differ.