A Fresh Look at Writing // Conditions for Effective Writing

Reading: A Fresh Look At Writing by Donald H. Graves

            In this week’s readings, Graves introduced us to his own strategies and how he helps children to write.  He addresses the discovering of a writing topic, how he conducts writing conferences, and how to share children’s writing in the classroom.  He begins with a simple conversation [with both primary and intermediate students] and guides them with simple questions.  This demonstration shows students how writing topics can develop from actual events and life experiences.  To continue, he models his own writing process—how he begins his writing with telling a story, drawing a picture, and then transitioning from oral telling to written.  It is easier for students to understand the process and what is being expected from the activity when a teacher models for them.

            Something else really stood out to me when reading A Fresh Look at Writing.  Every education class taken, every textbook bought, and every strategy book read reiterates and emphasizes how important it is to KNOW YOUR STUDENTS.  It is important to recognize what skills your students have and what they are struggling with.  Knowing where they are at academically and developmentally will make it easier for you to assess and plan out what they next steps are for their learning.

Reading: Conditions for Effective Writing

·       Create a classroom that encourages writing.

·       Provide enough time and opportunities for writing—give yourself enough time to conduct conferences, mini-lessons, and demonstrations.

·       Your classroom should feel comfortable—students should be open to sharing their writing and talking about their topics.

Every Mark on the Page

Reading: Every Mark on the Page by Kate Foley Cusumano

“I wanted these family members to believe in their children’s ability to succeed at writing.”

            As I sit here in Bloomingfoods reading this article, one of the kids from Harmony [an elementary school I work at] runs around the corner.  The entire time I read this, I thought about how I see writing develop in their classroom.  In Every Mark on the Page, Cusumano acknowledges the fact that family and community members need to highlight the strengths of a developing young writer’s work.  They should look for and value the meaning of the piece and the effort put into the writing.  The child may not be spelling the word correctly or using punctuation in the right ways but there is always something in a child’s work that implies that they are on the right track to becoming a successful writer.

            For the most part, my time at Harmony is spent playing games, building things, drawing masterpieces, and writing stories with the kids.  Just as Cusumano encourages—these children are given all the time, materials, and space to create something, anything.  When they make a mistake or see a flaw in their creations, they think about a solution and then fix it.  I see this in their writing.

            Last week, a 6 year-old boy and I wrote a sequel to a story we wrote the previous week.  First, he drew a picture of the main character.  This was his topic of choice and he was able to think about where he wanted his story to go.  As he continued, the storyline didn’t really make sense but I could tell he was aware that there should be a beginning, middle, and end of a story.  He used his knowledge of letters and the sounds they make to form words—not to say he had perfect spelling but he was using what he knows.  I believe it’s important to encourage their efforts.  I used to ask the kids if they wanted to write and they always said no.  I’ve also come across the kids who will write but they become frustrated and quit.  So I’ve been letting them come to me when they want to write.  If you force a child to do anything, they’ll lose interest and they’ll be less willing to do it.

            One idea that Cusumano shared in her article was a newsletter.  I think I only had a few teachers do newsletters when I was in elementary school.  I like the thought of giving parents ideas of how to encourage and practice educating their own children in an effective way.  As a teacher, I want everyone to be on the same page—what we’re learning, activities we are doing, and what’s going on in the classroom.  I think that contributes to creating a positive and encouraging classroom environment appropriate for children’s learning.

Reading Recovery Webcast

Webcast: Small Groups: Making Decisions for Individual Learners within a Small Group Setting

            This webcast emphasized the importance of small group work and having students collaborate together when practicing literacy and fluency.  Literacy is an essential component when students are learning and applying reading and writing strategies into their daily work.  As a teacher, I think the most important thing to focus on is to acknowledge what the learner needs.  I think this simple task can be easily lost in the process of teaching a lesson that needs to be covered.  Adding to this statement, I also believe that grouping students together based on their needs is beneficial to their learning and to your effectiveness as a teacher.  Every student learns differently—some can listen and understand where as some need visual instruction.  Using small groups allows you to pick books based on their reading levels and interests, focus on specific concepts depending on the students’ needs, and allows students of the same skills/levels to discuss and learn together.

            Another great point that not only the webcast talks about but we, as a class, has discussed every week—give students enough opportunities and time to read and write.  This isn’t just advice that is given frequently to teachers for the heck of it!  I think it’s something that not only teachers but also parents should focus on.  Personally, at the start of the semester I thought this was just common sense—I mean who hasn’t heard the saying “practice makes perfect”?  But I’ve come to realize that this is a point that is easily forgotten.  Giving any student enough time to practice their reading and writing will improve their skills and hopefully make them love it.  Now giving students, especially ELL students, this time both independently and in small groups will give them an additional, if not more beneficial, activity for their learning.  It gives them the opportunity to learn and fully understand the reading strategies and then combine their new knowledge and language skills to practice with a group discussion.  Merging both reading and language skills for ELL students will help them develop and improve their cognition and language.

[For Jill: This webcast was definitely not a short video like the one I mistakenly watched, but was a lot more useful and informational for teaching practices.  Sorry again for my confusion last week!!]

Phonics to Fluency & a Reflection on Field Experience

Readings: From Phonics to Fluency: Effective Teaching of Decoding and Reading Fluency in the Elementary School

And Teaching Phonemic Awareness

            These two readings focus on helping teachers expand their knowledge on phonics, fluency, and phonemic awareness and how to teach these concepts to their students.  In the reading of From Phonics to Fluency, I realized that some of the definitions given were some that I’d never really thought of.  I knew what the words were and I could put my own definition to them, but the authors worded them perfectly.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that they made me understand the concept of phonemes and the meanings of the words in a different way and better than I had before.

However, I haven’t written about my time at University in a while so I want to share that experience with you all.  In the past couple of weeks I have made a lot of progress.  My case study student has now exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be more proud.  Two weeks ago I brought my laptop to field experience to introduce the iMovie idea and he didn’t even hesitate.  He wrote for me! I got a whole page of dialogue for his sports cast iMovie [which is a huge step up from the 3 sentences I got the first week of writing samples].  I then had him read his independent reading for me.

This is an entirely different experience.  My case study student is a great reader.

·       Fluency. CHECK.

·       Comprehension. CHECK.

·       Good-fit book. CHECK.

Before he started reading, I asked him to summarize what has happened in the book so far.  Assuming he would give me a short and sweet summary with all of the main events, I got every single detail—all the way to where the character was sleeping for the night.  I think it’s great that he gets passionate about the book he is reading and wants to tell me every detail about every character and event but I would much rather him tell me about the important things that I need to know to understand the book.

SO FASTFORWARD—this past week I wanted to work on Determining Importance—one of the many strategies we have worked on this semester.  I quickly grabbed a blank piece of paper before we left for our classrooms.  I made two columns: 1) What’s Important, and 2) What’s Interesting.  I had him fill these two columns out but for some reason he didn’t put ANYTHING under the “What’s Interesting” column.  He has started a new book over his fall break so I thought it was a bit weird that he didn’t have anything to share in that column.  Well, we ended up talking about it and as he was reading his “What’s Important” column, he started adding in little details to his summary just as he had done the week before.

That was quite a long story for such a short revelation.  Anyways, shortly after this 10-minute conversation with my student, I realized that instead of putting “What’s Interesting” in the second column, it might’ve been more beneficial for me to write “Supporting Details” so that he could’ve organized his ideas and thoughts in a more efficient way.

The next opportunity I have to work on determining importance with him, I think it’d be cool to see what he does with different activity.  I was thinking about doing a web so that we could both visualize his thought process about what is important and what is just another detail:

….so on & so forth.

Thoughts?

Reading Recovery Webcast

Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System

            This short webcast from Reading Recovery really emphasizes the importance of having a solid foundation to build a comprehensive literacy system that is effective to the students’ reading and writing skills.  Incorporating this kind of system in your school’s current literacy practices supports high literacy instruction and requires you to collaborate with your colleagues to construct the most beneficial program for your students’ learning.  It is repeated several times that we must know where our current literacy practices stand.

·       Where are we as a program currently?

·       What are our goals for the future?

·       How are we going to reach these goals?

These are all questions that need to be asked when trying to build a stronger literacy system.  Discussing and assessing your school’s current literacy practices will help you figure out where you need to be as a school and how you are going to get there.  Collecting and analyzing student data will be beneficial when trying to figure out what needs to be introduced and practiced for reading and writing which will eventually boost test scores.  This semester we have learned a variety of strategies on how to teach comprehension and literacy.  We have been introduced to an endless amount of activities to practice reading and writing with young learners.  This five-minute video now tells us how important it is to incorporate everything we have learned into our own future classrooms and how it will highly benefit our students’ literacy skills.

Notes: What is Guided Reading?

·       Reading aloud, shared reading, literature circles are all activities that will help children learn how to read BUT guided reading allows teachers to show children how to read.  They are also able to support children as they read.

·       Guided reading leads to the independent reading that builds the process.

·       Guided Reading—a context in which a teacher supports each reader’s development of effective strategies for processing novel texts at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty.

·       Purpose—to enable children to use and develop strategies “on the run”, focus mainly on constructing meaning.

·       We want independence and fluency!

·       Also involves ongoing observations and assessment

·       Has students practicing self-monitoring

·       Essential components—observation, powerful examples, and support

·       Work with small groups—students in each group should be in the same general level.

·       Enable children to read for meaning at all times

·       Provide good reading materials—variety, appropriate levels (not too easy, not too challenging)

Catching Readers Before They Fall [Chapters 5 & 10]

A Comprehensive Literacy Framework

Being a positive, supportive teacher is what I strive to be in the future.  I want to help students reach their fullest potential and allow them to accomplish their goals independently.  We have discussed different strategies to help students with their reading and writing skills in and outside of the classroom.  I think it is important to teach students different ways to practice and improve their literacy.  In chapter 5, it is emphasized that reading to, with, and by children will be most beneficial for beginning readers and is an easy way to introduce the different comprehension strategies.  By incorporating different activities such as:

·       Read-Aloud

·       Shared Reading and Interactive Read-Aloud

·       Guided Reading

·       Independent Reading

·       Community Writing

·       Independent Writing

students who are learning to read or want to improve their literacy skills will enjoy it more when given different opportunities of practice.  Depending on the grade level, you could split the students into groups and have them focus on different lessons.  However, I also think that as you get into the upper grades, students should spend more time independently and will require more one on one time if they are struggling with a specific skill. 

Students shouldn’t spend a lot of time struggling and getting frustrated on something that could be easily solved.  It is important to recognize and know when our students need a little guidance and help.  There should be explicit instruction and plenty of time to “catch” the students “before they fall.”

Catching Readers Before They Fall: Beyond "Sound It Out"

It’s interesting to think about how the human brain works.  We read a paragraph the other week in class that basically said that letters don’t need to be in the correct order for us to read and understand what the word is:

“Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

We can predict what a word says because we recognize the first and last letter.  Although the letters are not in the correct places, we can unknowingly put them in the right sequence to form the word.  We often say, “sound it out” when children are struggling to say a word.  I was doing a puzzle game with the kids at Harmony the other day.  It required them to look at a picture, figure out what letter the subject of the picture started with, and to match the picture with the correct letter (For instance, nail starts with an N).  I kept telling them to sound it out but reading the first page of chapter 4 in Catching Readers Before They Fall, it makes sense why we shouldn’t tell them that.  We have so many words in the English language that do not sound like they should.  I realized that I constantly have to be correcting them or telling them different rules like why “th” sounds the way it does and so forth.

We have discussed comprehension every single day in both of our E339 and E340 classes.  And we have concluded that comprehension includes putting meaning to the text.  So when students put meaning to what they are reading, they should easily be able to “solve a word” if need be.  When you have fill in the blanks, it’s always nice to have options (or so I thought when I was in grade school).  If students understand the material correctly, there should be multiple vocabulary words that pop into their heads when they need to solve for a word.  However, I think this skill varies from student to student.  This goes back to how often students read.  The more they read, the better their language and vocabulary will be—the easier it will be for them to do this specific task of solving words using additional information.

There will be days at Harmony where a kid will pull out a book on his/her own.  I usually proceed asking if they would like me to read that book to them and I usually get a yes.  But every now and again, the child will grab my hand, lead to me to the couch, and open the book.  Instead of reading (given that they are only 3-6 year olds), they begin to look at the pictures.  This is an example of how children will use the pictures and their own background knowledge to come up with a story or infer what is going on in the book.  I think it’s fascinating to listen to the stories they come up with.  Often times the kids will understand what the pictures are implying and proceed with the correct storyline (usually the older ones) but there are the other kids who interpret the pictures completely different and their imaginations run off the pages.  It’s amazing!  But then I start to wonder, should I be teaching them how to read these words or just continue with their storytelling?  Well, how do I even begin to teach them what that word sounds like?

In field experience this past week; I was conducting a reading conference with one of the sixth graders (not my case-study student).  He came across the word “kaleidoscope” and didn’t recognize it—didn’t know how to pronounce it.  He looked up at me and I said the word slowly.  He looked at it and repeated.  I then asked if he knew what a kaleidoscope was and he said no.  So I explained.  Immediately after, he realized he knew what it was he just had never put a word to it.  I guess my main point of this story is that I believe it’s important to put meaning behind a word—make sure they know what it is!  If you tell a student to sound it out, what good is that doing if they don’t truly understand?  They will sound out the letters until they reach the end goal, which is pronouncing the word correctly.  In other words, their full attention is not on the word, it’s on the phonetic component of the word.  There must be a balance of meaning, structure, and visual information of words.  I think Fountas and Pinnell, authors of Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency say it perfectly, “Prediction provides a forward motion, which enables the reader to spend much less attention on letters and word parts” (56).

[Quick Self-Reflection: side comment] In the past few weeks of beginning the reading and writing cluster for my elementary education degree, I’ve found myself reflecting on my own experiences with reading and writing.  I was never really big on the whole literary aspect of school—but I got through it.  But as I entered college, I don’t think I was fully prepared for the reading content.  Looking back, I was quickly frustrated with words that I didn’t know in the materials that I was reading.  I felt like I was falling behind in the class work, reading slower, and ended up struggling to write a page or two of what I had just read.

On page 56 of Catching Readers Before They Fall they mention how this can be problematic for readers.  When a reader takes the time to examine each word, they are usually reading too slow and lose meaning of the text.  Now I realize that my example is a bit different than a 2nd or 3rd grader learning to read, but it has the same concept.  Using meaningful and structural information simultaneously from the text is most beneficial for readers.  It can help them choose correct words that make sense with the reading.  Maybe using such information can also guide them to make an educated guess of what a word might mean.  This process seems to become quite natural when readers actually comprehend the material.