Trying a New Writing Strategy

           Because I am not teaching, I needed to find a child on whom to try a new writing strategy.  It just so happened that I had five children staying with me last week, so I chose the 6 year old who is in first grade as my student. I will use Max as his pseudonym.
           I chose to try shared writing with Max because he seems to have missed much of the important basics of writing as well as how to even write words and put letters in alphabetical order. 
           The first thing that I did was work through the alphabet with him using some foam letters I have.  He worked hard to put the letters in the correct order though he did need some help with this task.  After we worked through the alphabet we moved on to spelling some words with the letters.  He was able to spell the words: put, box, run, and top on his own. After playing with the letters, we moved on to the shared writing portion of my time with him.  I got out a small dry erase board and dry erase markers.  I asked Max what he would like to write about and he said, "my new baby brother".  I thought this was a good topic to use for writing because it was personal and interesting for the student.  So we brainstormed a list of words that made him think of his baby brother.  Some of the words included: bottles, baby, milk, crying, diapers, and mommy.  I took out another small dry erase board and we began the actual shared writing.  He told me what he would like the story to say and I wrote it down on the board emphasizing my use of punctuation and sentence formation.  He used the words from the other board to remind himself of what he wanted to say.  The process took a lot of prompting on my part, but I think he learned more about how sentences look and how they can tell a story.
     I learned from this process that when you take your time and give personal attention to one student they can learn a lot in a very short period of time.  I enjoyed working with Max because I was able to help him express himself in writing.  I see Max on a pretty regular basis and I think that I will try shared writing with him again very soon.  I would like to see him be able to form more words on his own, to form his own sentences and eventually a paragraph.  

Writing Strategy that Worked: Autobiographies

In the summer of 2009 I worked at an inner-city ministry where I ran a summer program  for middle school students.  During the summer program the students read Left To Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza which is an account of a woman's experience in Rwanda during the 1993 genocide.  During the time the students were in the program they pre-wrote, wrote and edited their autobiography.  We began by brainstorming about their lives and they wrote down ten things that they thought were important in thier lives and arranged them in chronological order.  Then they took those things and created an essay with an introduction, body and conclusion.  Then the students proofread their work. Because some of the stories were personal, I and my fellow staff members edited some of their  papers with them instead of having the other students do it.

      My reason for having these students do this assignment was that I wanted them to be able to tell their story, even if no one else was going to read it.  For some of the students this was a real emotional outlet that allowed them to face some of the tragic and heartbreaking events that they had experienced in their lives.
     
      I  learned from this experience that students are extremely eager to tell their story to someone, even if it is just to a piece of paper.  Biographies are a great way to have students express themselves in a very personal way.  I felt that it was important to allow students to skip the peer editing part of this assignment if they wanted to.  These stories were very personal and I respected these students very much for being willing to share with  my co-workers and I. I love having a copy of all of these stories to remind me of these special students. 

Following the assignment I encouraged the students to keep telling the story of their lives through writing.  I think that journaling is highly effectve in building writing skills. Journaling is what I recommended to the students to move on to next.  Just to write down thoughts or feelings about significant moments in life is a wonderful way to measure your growth as a person.      

 

 

Scholastic Books Website: Online Activities and Interactive Learning

The Online and Interactive Activities section of the Scholastic Books website holds many resources for online workshops and activties for students when they are in centers. Across the top of the page there are tabs indicating grade level ranges.  After you click on a grade level the page will change to activties appropriate for that grade level.  I will be using the 3-5 section as my example for this post. As you scroll down the grades 3-4 tabbed page you will see on the left a long list of langauge arts activities and links.  At the end you will also see the Writing and Publishing section.

I particularly like the workshops section which includes many different topics such as biography, news reporting, poetry, speech writing and many more.  These are really neat because they step the student through the writing process to create whatever genre of writing they are composing.  Here is a link to the writing workshop on biographies. It first gives the student a short piece of biographical writing to help them get a feel for the genre, then it steps them through brainstorming, writing and publishing.  Pretty cool for an online resource!  The kids could totally do this on their own.  This is only one of the many helpful things on this website. 

I will definitely use this in my classroom for some independent writing instruction for students who might need some step by step instructions after I have taught about genres or any other writing topic.

Writing Fix by the Northern Nevada Writing Project

Writing Fix is a very detailed and helpful site for all types of writing resources.  One of the many helpful functions of this wibsite is the daily journal entry topic generator! It is so hard to come up with an interesting topic every day. This resource helps solve that problem. The generator has over 500 topics, so you are sure to be able to find some that you love.  This website has a topic for almost everything I can think of for writing.  It is exaustive in the areas that it covers.  It has a lot of lesson plans using picture books that seem like they are of very high quality. 

I think a good way to begin exploring this page would be to start with the "Top Ten Resources" tab on the left of the home page to get a sampling of the information and helpful resources offered.  I can think of hundreds of ways to use this website to enhance my teaching.  Another really neat part of the website (which could take hours to go through) is the Digital Photo Journal Prompt section.  I think it would be fun to have students share what they took the picture to mean. FUN!   It is always great to find an arsenal of new ideas for writing!

READ WRITE THINK

The National Council of English Teachers (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) power a website called Read Write Think which has a section dedicated to classroom resources.  This section includes Lesson Plans, Student Interactives, Calendar Activities and Printouts. 

The lesson plans are very detailed and have the standards used included as well as many additional resources to use.  Here is a link to a lesson plan for a Seasonal Haiku, very good.  

The student interactives are very helpful for use in writing centers.  They would make an excellent technology rich center for any age group. Here is an example of one of the interactive games about inquiry and analysis.  It is called The Hero's Journey.  This is a very good way to get students involved in their work.

A very awesome part of this website is the calendar activities.  The site describes the calendar:"Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students. View by day, by week, or by month."  It is so great to see all of this information all put together!! I am so excited to use this to make writing much more relevant.  Putting a date with a person and what happened during that period of time will bring life to authors and thier stories. For example, Stellaluna writer Janell Cannon was born on November 3, 1957.  This link will take you to the page where the ideas for using her birthday in lessons are.  The uses for this in the classroom are endless, there is something for every day!!

Finally the printouts are helpful because they include many graphic organizers, high quality writing starters, and instructional texts.  There are a whole bunch of graphic organizers for all grade levels as well as several great writing starters.  There are even some great looking assessment tools.

The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab)

The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) is a resource that I have actually used myself for help in my own writing.  It is a comprehensive resource for a variety of writing skills.  It includes sections which cover everything from general writing skills to poetry to ESL.  It is a pretty manageable site to navigate and even has a very helpful MLA and APA guide for teaching older students about citations. 

I would use this resource as a place form which to draw information for teaching (reminders of grammar rules and mechanics) as well as some exercises for students' use.  There are some great resources for ideas of creative projects to assign as well. 

In my classroom I would use this web resource as a reference for the students.  It is a "one-stop-shop" for help with grammar, mechanics and style and is very easy to manuver. It will give older students a place to find answers to their questions without having to feel silly for not remembering their grammar rules.