'Just Write' photo (c) 2011, Sean MacEntee - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I’ve previously The Best Questions To Use For Class Closing Activities — What Are Yours? and have done a much better job this year at using them than I’ve done in the past. And I’ve also seen how valuable they have been to both students and to me.

In my ninth-grade English class, students completed writing an essay on the last day prior to Thanksgiving break. Their closing question was “What did you learn about writing today?”

Here were a few responses:

I learned how to organize and to use evidence.

One thing I learned about writing as essay was that it takes a bit of thinking.

The one thing I learned about writing an essay was that it was kind of hard because we have to try and find the evidence.

I learned that writing an essay is not that difficult now because finding quotes and evidence that support my writing is getting easier.