What I See Now
I was most interested in chapter eight of Writing Essentials, because it covered some activities I currently see in my classroom such as "writing workshop," as well as some ideas to expand these lessons to increase learning for students. Most mornings our students are given a suggestion prompt in which they can chose to follow or come up with their own topic. The only requirements are that students must work silently and write at least twelve lines within their composition notebooks. After about 20-25 minutes of writing, students are welcome to raise their hand to share with the class their entries. Then we move onto a daily math lesson. So you can see there is no time allotted for reflecting or revisions/editing. I have not seen a writing lesson taught by my mentor teacher yet.
Improvements
It is important to encourage our young writers to write with a purpose and to consider an audience. Routman (2005) suggests that teachers, "begin by identifying an important topic for a specific reader and then teach the skills students need to write about that topic- both those you anticipate they will need and those that crop up as they write" (175). What types of audiences could you encourage your students to write towards? Why is this important?
What I Want to Try
Further, I was looking for more information about writing conferences, when I noticed that chapter nine was entirely dedicated to this one practice! Handy! I want to try conferences possibly this year, but definitely in the future as a teacher. These quick checks and one-on-one time offer valuable and personalized feedback to your students. One important note I made was that the more clearly you explain and also model your expectations, the less hectic your follow-up conferences will be.
This section was a lot of new information and suggestions, but I found this to be a bit overwhelming. Were there any topics, strategies, and/or handouts/evaluations that stood out as particularly helpful to you? Anything you would use? Why? Is there something you're critical of?
To start off this post, I want to say I am amazed your students are expected two write twelve lines. Each morning my students are excpected to write five sentences, and the majority do not meet this requirement. At first I was very excited to provide prompts for the students in the format my MT provided but I have found much to be desired with this style of prompt as I feel student don't put any effort into in the morning. I wonder how important or useful writing everyday (I'll call it free writing) is everyday. Deespite not checking their grammar, sentence structure, etc., it benefits them to write every single day.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the entire chapter 8 was about everyday writing, it included writing in different genres and different styles of writing. I will try to implement this into the writing that I'm in charge of.
Lauren - I also agree that I want to try the strategies in Chapter 9. I feel these techniques, especially the checklist on page 223, is very practical and helpful advice that should be used in the classroom. I am pretty confident that my teacher does not do conferences as described in the book so it will be difficult to teach the norms and try to make this into a regular and normal part of the day. Tomorrow, we are starting to write our first five paragraph essay on a memory the students come up with. I am curious to see what kind of instruction my teacher provides the students with before or after introducing the assignment.
In regards to the conversation about the free writing- I think it's good that students have a little time to "free write" even if it's with a prompt. I feel way too many of my students are always so concerned with their spelling and if what they’re writing is “good” when they have to write for a writers workshop- I wish my students had more free time to write just for them as I believe that a lot of my students actually enjoy writing.
ReplyDeleteIn other news, I thoroughly enjoyed reading many of the ideas in chapter 7 in Strategies that Work. I loved the discussion of “connections in common” on pages 103-104. I actually laughed out loud a few times when reading the student examples (maybe it’s just the end of a long day with my outrageous 5th graders…). I liked the discussion these pages had regarding helping students learn what a “meaningful” connection is in regards to the book they are reading. They gave the example of introducing “My connection/Important to me/Important to Understanding” charts. It made the point that we don’t want students to think that their ideas don’t matter, but it helps them sort their ideas into these categories so that they may be able to learn what connections they should focus on and what ones are maybe just important to them or is just a simple connection they made, but it’s relative to the text at hand.
I also was fond of the “puzzle drive” discussion starting on page 109. As a young educator, I think one of my strengths is pushing students to ask questions, mostly because I find myself being good at doing that myself. I hope to fuel curiosity in my students and I hope to learn more questioning techniques that help students push their thinking and also become more analytical. I also liked how this section placed a lot of emphasis on background knowledge- it’s much easier to ask a question if you at least know a little bit about the topic at hand. It’s important to help students learn how to ask the right questions- an ongoing process, you can be sure!
Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI believe that is good that your students have the opportunity to write everyday. As [u]Writing Essentials[u] discusses, being a writer requires writing exposure daily. Many teachers tend to focus on revision and creating a more "polished" paper, when what students really need is to produce better ideas for their papers. Writing with better ideas requires writing experience as well as guidance from the teacher.
I like how your class gets the opportunity to share their readings with the class. This allows students to hear what their classmates are writing, and is the perfect opportunity for the teacher to model reading/writing skills. For example, my teacher always gives my students an open ended prompt such as: "What is your favorite memory," "Talk about your favorite object," or "Tell me about an important person in your life." My teacher then tells a story using the prompt. The first time she will use minimal details and she has the students ask her questions. Next, she will tell the story again, adding information that the students told her was missing and adding some more of her own information. After modeling this technique to the class, she will then allow students an ample amount of time (15-20 minutes) to write their own responses. When everyone is finished, she asks for volunteers to read their writings. As a class, everyone discusses how that person can improve their essay.
Revisions/editing is not very common in my class. So far, one out of the three writings were edited and revised. Like the reading explains, I believe that revising and editing should be secondary to free writing.
Like Piotr explains in his post, I also believe that Chapter 9 had a lot of beneficial material that can be adapted to fit in the classroom.
I also wanted to respond to Lauren's question regarding writing to a specific audience. I believe that tailoring your writing to certain audiences can be beneficial, but for the most part, is not necessary to focus on. Certain types of writing should consider the audience: letters, persuasive essays, and formal papers. However, most writings are not with a "purpose" to convince or persuade anyone to believe anything. Students write to tell a story. Allowing students to write to whatever audience (or an undefined audience) allows them to create their "voice," which is extremely important in writing. "Voicing" comes from being comfortable and confident in explaining yourself in written word.
Enough of my rambling.
Matt