While many other Saskatchewan ELA students write final exams to end their courses, you’ve had many experiences with the Exit Interview. This focuses on your mindset through your work in the course, the goals you hoped to achieve and looking back to see whether you came close or met them, as well as identifying the skills you grew in and continue to build.

You’ll have an Exit Interview again this end of semester, but you’ll also enjoy writing a simple exam that will demonstrate your skill in writing the literary analytical essay.

The final product that you develop in this one class period will NOT be developed to the level you are familiar with for your other essay projects, since those projects will be the result of several hours of work.

This essay may be somewhat simplistic, but will demonstrate your ability to:

• develop an appropriate and thoughtful analysis in response to an essay prompt of your choosing
• show your ability to connect the texts you’ve studied to a theme or concept and explore it through the analytical writing
• develop an essay with clear organization and structure, including transitions and topic sentences
• technique of your writing, including punctuation habits, even though it may be unpolished
• basic sense of writing voice, including your language choices and unqiue style of writing

Student-written Sample Essays:
Here (link below) are two examples of essays taken from a Provincial Exam. Students writing these essays had three hours to write their whole exam, which included much more than this essay. These essay samples are a good example of what you might expect to complete in your in-class exam.

ELA A30 prototype 2004-pages-38-42

For your exam:

• you’ll have a number of essay prompts to choose from that will represent the topics and themes we have discussed in the course
• you will be able to bring your binder in and any essay writing supports you’ve used in the past
• you’ll be able to use/refer to any of the literature you’ve studied in the course
• you’ll be asked to develop the essay in a Google doc, so have your laptop handy and charged/available to use. You’ll have to share your essay with me at the start of class.
  • handwritten on paper will be your back up
• you’ll be able to use Grammarly within your Google Doc

Here is how your writing will be assessed:

Topics or Themes your essay options may touch on include:

• the shared Canadian experience
• the unique Canadian experience or perspectives of different groups
• voices included in Canada’s history and stories and voices less included in these histories
• unique experiences from living on the land in different regions of Canada or different time eras of our past
• the natural landscape vesus constructed landscape and its impact on the emotions and experiences of individuals
• the theme of “survival” that is constant in Canadian literature
• how the various experiences of Canadians contributes to a sense of national identity

Text Resources Used in Class Available at this Link