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Classroom App: WritingClassroom App: WritingKendal Obermeyer, Mon December 05, 2005, 07:24 AMYou may either apply a tool/strategy from the Writing Presentation or select a lesson from the Read/Write/Think website. Try in your classroom, then report your observations/findings in the thread below.Post a Response |
I currently do not have my own classroom and am unable to try out a strategy in a classroom. I did however reseach the read/write/think website and found an interesting strategy. I liked the idea of family message journals. When I was a regular ed teacher I did a similar activity and it worked out well. This tends to get the students excited about their writing and learning in general. If I were a regular ed teacher this would be the strategy I would try in the classroom.
I went to the Read, Write, and Think website and found a blank flip book that you could print out and create your own. I decided to make a flip book on Landforms, since we are learning about different landforms. I was able to choose how many pages I wanted in the book and what I wanted the title page to say, along with the other pages. The students seemed to really enjoy making the flip books. The website is http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/flipbook.
I downloaded the thinksheet for expository writing while I was watching the writing presentation. My class is currently writing to persuade so I adapted the graphic organizer to fit better with persuasive writing. It was set up with where the writer stands and followed up with spots for them to enter reasons why they believe what they do and why the reader agree with the writer. I really believe in graphic organizers for writing and reading so this activity really helped my students organize the writing piece.
I have been introducing letter form to my first graders. Discussions of story versus letter was taught, and for our first lesson, we picked a winter character and wrote a letter to that character. The first day I have about 5 letter formats and the rest were stories. When we did this activity the second day, I got 18 letters and 4 stories. Each day we will write a letter and each day kids are writing more questions to the character. This activity cannot be done in the Harcourt program because it is so limited.
We have been learning to write a friendly letter, so a number of the think sheets will apply to my students' writing. I plan on putting them into effect immediatly. I am excited though, to use the thinksheet specific to expository writing because after the break we are going to begin learning to write a research report on a specific animal. This sheet will be wonderful for my students to organize and get down their ideas in the correct format. I will have to report back as to how it worked, but my prediction is that it will really help my students with putting their ideas into writing.
I read the article about Tamara Filbrandt and decided to try her positive classroom experience with poetry. I am having my students read poetry in class. We are memorizing short poems to recite to the class. We are also taking time to talk about the many different kinds of poetry and poets. So far we have talked about Shel Silverstein and are moving on to Paul Fleischman. I have noticed a change in my students attitude towards poetry (especially the boys). My students are also more excited to write and share poems.
My students are working on friendly letters, and I have used a graphic organizer that is similar to the drafting think sheet displayed in this session. My students had trouble using the ideas they created during the prewriting phase; they either forgot all about their original ideas, they used completely different ideas, or they used only one or two of the ideas they came up with before, without using additional details they included on the organizer. We have worked on friendly letters for two weeks (one per week). Both times, we have used webs as our organizers. When I noticed this problem the first week, I decided we would do a class brainstorm (on a web). This helped a great deal. I now want to incorporate the editing, revising, and proofreading checklists we reviewed in this session.
We took the ideas about illustrations further and I gave them a choice to write about one of their own drawings or to pick one of many that I had that were not captioned. We likened it to a painting in an art museum or the cover of a book, without the title: i.e. what do YOU think this is about? They did very well and were quite enthusiastic in their sharing of this project to the others and I think that's a huge part (motivation) of what it's all about!
Writing was my favorite subject that I taught in the regular classroom. I don't have a class I can do practice with now as I am the music teacher. But it was great information and I will use it if I ever go back to the regular class.
I am an ESL primary teacher and I used the Expository Think Sheet with my third grade group on "Raising A Dragon" from last wks anthology story. It was a collaborative writing lesson and everyone contributed having the background story.....For my 1st grade intervention group (read first/low yellow cells) we learned summarizing leveled reader stories. It took two sessions to finish. On a folded 8 spaced paper, we wrote the title,beginning,middle,end and drew in the spaces above. They did great and were proud of their sentences.
I do not get to do much writing with my students in the intervention groups. We have a few language arts lessons were they are writingand we have started to edit some of those pieces in the short time that we have. After i modeled I had the students try. i Have not yet used the Editing checklist or the Partner checklist, but i will use them in future lessons after the break to help the students look at their own writing and use the partner one to discuss what they wrote. I do have them share what they read and they enjoy that very much.
I tried Rebecca's idea of the flip books from the website. I was really surprised with the results that I got from my third graders. I divided the flip book into four parts and had my students summarize the four main parts of our weekly story. I told the students that they needed to look for the big ideas to write about and then they could draw an illustration to accompy the writing. The students then did an outstanding job of summarizing and I was really happy with the writing that I received. I then held teacher-student conferences to review their writing. The students in their conferences corrected many grammar errors on their own. Just having me re-read the text to the students, helped them hear how the story sounded when read out loud by another party. The students had a great time using the flip books and I was glad to get that idea. I see many other writing opportunities with the flip books. I feel that this would also make a great pre-writing activity of the students to get their thoughts down before they started writing. Thanks for the idea.
Our class worked on learning the writing process. I have been taking the students through the process step by step. We are doing one piece each day and working on friendly letters. Each day I post the part of the process that we are learning and I model it for the students. I have many different visual aids that I use and we just finished our first week of the process. My plan is to next go through it again and make it an independent activity but with some scaffolding by leaving up the process and the visuals that we used through the process. My plan is to make this a regular activity going through the entire process with different types of writing over the rest of the semester.
I really liked the idea that Rebecca wrote about with the read, write, think website where she used the flip books with Landforms. I was trying to think of a neat way for my students to show their knowledge on Rocks. This is defintely an idea that I will use when we get back from Winter Break with our Rocks unit.
In my intervention group we are currently working on writing a personal narrative and going through the five step writing process. The students were very successful at brainstorming and mapping their ideas and creating the first draft. They struggled with the editing and revising components, even after a lot of modeling from me. When we return from break I plan on taking the editing checklist and simplifying it down to a first grade level for the students. I feel that by giving them more specifics to look for (capital at the beginning, period at the end, I is capitalized, etc.) they will understand the importance of the editing process. The writing presentation had a lot of great ideas to use in the classroom, and I look forward to using many of them.
I use all the instructional techniques suggested in the writing presentation. I work with K/1 special education students, and they require a lot of modeling. I find it necessary to demonstrate writing as a process, so that the students have a reference from which to draw. I use shared writing when we have completed an activity and I want the students to collaboratively create a written piece. Depending on the level of the students, I sometimes include interactive writing to create a more complex exercise in the writing process. Finally, both guided and independent writing are used when I am working with students during a creative or descriptive writing activity. I try to bring a balance to the writing experience, keeping in mind the instruction and frustration level of the student.
When I had my own classroom (5th grade) I taught them the writing process. We went through each step and I modeled it explicitly. Eventually, I was able to give them a form (an idea I borrowed from another teacher)with:
Brain Drain Sloppy Copy Goof Proof Neat Sheet Final Fame
In addition, there was another form that had certain points for each step of the writing process, Voice, Organization, Ideas and Conventions; title page with illustration; name, date, etc. Eventually, this became routine and students knew what to do. I did have the opportunity to work with a small group of students (outside of the 90 minute block) on the writing process. I covered the very basics - brainstorming (webbing), sloppy copy, proofreading, final copy and publishing.
In my intervention groups we have been working on writing a personal narrative and so we focused more on using graphic organizers and sticking to one topic. Most of the students did a really good job with this. I am going to have the students concentrate on this and will now move on to editing and revising as our primary focus. I did use the Author's Chair for them to read their final drafts and they loved it.
We have been focusing our attention on having students illustrate their ideas and then write what they illustrated. Students have showed incredible progress with this process of writing and really enjoy these activities. Students use their decoding skills to write out their words and they also use inventive spelling. These are part of the writing and learning process and enhance their language arts. Before we hit the holidays, our classes did more writing and students were excited about these activities. They wrote letters, made wish lists, and even created sentences with partners utilizing vocabulary words. We have also implemented dictation in the classroom writing activities. Students illustrate and then we dictate exactly what they say about their drawings. Students really enjoy this process, because then they can be proud about the fact that they can read what has been dictated for them. We will focus more and more on writing as the year progresses, as well as utilizing the strategies presented throughout this section.
Recently I modeled using Sketch to Stretch in a third grade classroom. This is a NELIP activity that includes student reading, sketching, talking and writing - all the literacy components in one lesson. I have used this from 1st to 5th grades with great results every time. First, the student is given a paper or little book with different squares or pages to draw on. After reading each page or section of the book they are directed to sketch what they read about. Then they talk with their partner about what they sketched, taking turns. They then add anything they want to the sketch and write about that part of the selection. This continues until the whole book/passage is finished. What the student ends up with is their own book about the selection. It helps with oral language, comprehension, summarizing, main idea and writing.
Since I do a lot of writing with my 4th grade students I decided to try to organize it more with writers workshop. We spend around 30-60 minutes on each piece of writing that we do. Beginning with an outline, then a rough draft and editing, and finally re-writing a final copy. On occassion we share our writing with others, mostly on short journal pieces. We need to do this more with our more formal pieces that we write during writer's workshop They enjoy hearing what others have written. Teaching mini lessons on the different writing traits worked well for my students. I really noticed that they focused on the trait that was taught (ie. voice, organization, etc.) I did not get to the individual conferencing part, but it is in the plan.
I used the revising checklist with my second grade group. I had to walk through every student with using this checklist. It helped some of the students change their writings. But, some thought nothing was wrong anywhere. I will need to teach more self-monitoring with these students. This is a good tool to continually use with writing.
I teach only ELL students. With my 5th garde ELL students, I used "Step-Up-to-Writing." We had worked on writng complete sentences to express single thoughts before we started writing single paragraphs. The prewriting always involved brainstorming of ideas about a picture, or a series of pictures, provided, which led to building a web of selected ideas. We also discussed and decided on an appropriate title leading to writing the topic sentence. The students still have difficulties expressing the ideas in complete sentences. Writing the concluding sentence also proved to be difficult. Throughout the writing process, I mini-conferenced with each of them. Sharing the writing is optional, but I do read and share their (good and flawed)writing selectively and on an anonimous basis, for purposes of mini-teaching. I also use selected sentences for teaching mini lessons on synonyms ("What's another word we can use?") and parts of speech. We have yet to move on to multi-paragraph writing.
I downloaded a number of sheets on how to write letters. I love premade forms and found these very helpful. I am also going to check out the website regarding the section on the flipbooks to add something different to their studies. This website was sooo full of useful information I have jotted it down for future reference.
In my class I do a lot of pre-writing. I like for the students to generate their ideas first so they are not so lost when they go back to their desks for independent practice. I love to do different types of bubbles for the students. I have done the bubble web and also a compare and contrast bubble map. My students really get into these because it is different than writing down everything in full sentences. Doing the bubble maps helps my students get ideas. If I did not do any types of pre-writing activities in my class my students would be lost. In Kindergarten they need to have a connection to what they are doing and this helps them have a connection to their work.
My kids are between the ages of three and five so A LOT of what I do is "pre" and beginning skills. In writing we are working on writing their names. Some are tracing their first name, some are all the way up to working on writing their first and last name together. There is a lot of visual and physical support.
Oh! - and another thing that we are really working on is identifying initial letters in words. They have gotten really good at doing it with each others names and now we are moving on to other words! :O
After reading some of the other responses about the read/write/think website I was curious to see what I would find. This website has a ton of good ideas for writing. Since our 4th graders are working on persuasive writing I found the idea of having your students make brochures to be very beneficial. The lesson was to have them make a brochure about reading over the summer, but you could adapt this idea for anything. It is a good and fun way to explain how to persuade your audience.
I also found the flipbooks appealing. They are easy to make, can be used to fit whatever theme or story you are working on, and the students absolutely love them. They quickly take ownership over the books. Since each child gets to take their own home I also think they serve well as a home-school connection.
My Kindergarten class has been talking and reading about our big feast we had over the holidays. We started with a graphic organizer, a web. We wrote all our yummy foods on large chart paper. This was shared writing. Next we go into Interactive writing, writing a list of things we need to buy at the store. Last the children write their own list of foods they need to buy at the grocery store. The writing assignment has been scaffolded. The children know exactly what to do and most important, the chilren can read their own list of foods they need at the grocery store. We all had a fun time and lots of success in both writing and then reading.
We have been working on writing friendly letters in my 1st grade classroom. During our writer's workshop time I had my students go through the writing process to plan and write a letter. I used both a chart that shows each step of the writing process to guide my students through each step. I then had my students track their own progress through each step using a chart. Each student had a clothespin with their name on it. As they completed each step of the writing process they moved their clothespin down to the next step they needed to complete until they finally published their letter.
With our class we did a Sea Creature Story this week as a center. The students got to pick 4 stickers and decorate a picture area. Then they had to write about the picture. The students really liked this activity.
In my classroom I have really been working on pre-writing. Using some of the ideas from the website and the school goal of using more thinking maps, I have intrgrated the thinking maps in to my pre-write.
I have used the tool of using background knowledge with my fifth grade students. I had students talk to the partners about the experience in last year with the big snow storm. We had been reading a book about the jungle so we compared the weather in the jungle compared to the experience they had last winter. We also, talked about their weather experiences from where every the students were from. I found this writing project to be fun and I think the students liked it. I think it is always great to be able to share self experiences and bring them into writing. It makes students very secure and validates them as individuals.
I give students a writing prompt each week. On Monday they Brainstorm, on Tuesday they do their first draft, I give them a rubric to check it, and they re-write on Wedneday. They give it to a peer to edit, then then they rewrite again on Thursday. They turn it in to be read by me and re-write their final draft on Friday to be graded. They hate all the re-writing, but I choose the papers to read aloud that have good points to show such as Ideas, Organization, Vocabulary, Voice, or Conventions. They like it when I pick one of theirs to read aloud (I don't use names so they don't get embarrassed).
In my kindergarten class, we have been reading a Mother Goose poem titled, "The Seasons." It uses words to describe each season like, "showery, happy and nippy." We used a grahic organizer(chart paper divided into 4 sections) and brainstormed words for each season. Some of the children then picked their favorite season and drew pictures,and wrote letters and words on the chart paper. All the children got a chance to express their favorite season and describe it. The assignment was then scaffolded as they wrote their own "sentences" using scribbles, pictures, and letters to describe their favorite season. Some of the students were able to sound out some words. This worked very well since the kids had the shared writing and graphic organizer to refer to. They were very motivated to share the writing as well. Many of them told about a previous experience in the snow or rain. (We talked about the flood over New Year's) I was surprised to hear so many of them refer to background knowledge to explain their season.
I like using a graphic organizer as a tool for writing. It gives the kids a reference to help them express their ideas.
When I went to the read/think/write website, I was excited to find this activity. I had seen it before and had wanted to do it with my students and I did. With Acrostic Poems: All About Me and My Favorite Things, I had my students use the letters of their names to begin each line. They really enjoyed it writing about themselves and illustrating their poems. I don't think they realized something like this could be considered poetry. You should try it.
In my second grade class, we have been working on using adjectives in our writing. We have discussed using words that will give the reader a picture in their head. In order to model the importance of word choice I started out by using adjectives to describe animals and the students had to figure out what animal I was describing. Next, the students each chose a picture that they wanted to describe first orally and then in writing. After the students described the picture in writing, the students got together with partners and switched papers. The students had to figure out by reading their partners writing what was in their picture.
I decided to look up the website about family message journals. I have learned something like this in a training that I had. I have my students write to me in an interactive journal. Sometimes I will tell them to write about something that they are learning in a subject area. Other times I will tell them to just write whatever they want. They love to do this because I will then write back to them. I often add a p.s. write back or ask a question. They enjoy answering my questions and asking me something. I also send home a home/school connection for science or social studies. The students have to do something with their family that pertains to that subject. It might be that the student has to teach his/her family all about what they learned in... They seem to enjoy this and talking with the parents, they really think its great!
The article itself brought up a lot of great ideas to think about during my writing times. I want to extend my writing to do more poetry.
I am glad that I am reading this assignment so late in that I have just acquired a 3rd grade comprehension group. I was having an extremely difficult time looking for a website to challenge their comprehension. This website listed a bunch of great books by grade level that will help the students learn critical thinking. I look forward to using some of these books in my classroom.
My first year of teaching I was given the book, In the Company with Children, by Joanna Hindley, it was life changing for me. From that moment on, writing was about creating community, letting students write about topics that mattered. As a classroom teacher every year I have introduced the notebook, and all students have kept one, including myself. Writing should be a sacred time, a time to express, and reflect ones thoughts and feelings. As a student, writing for me, was a bout the dreaded red pen, and feeling like I was not a good writer, therefore, I chose not to write. If only my teachers could have overlooked my love for run-on sentences, and really read what I had tosay maybeI would have become a writer, instead of a teacher. For myself, I always created a room where students could connect their personal experiences and put words to their thoughts on paper. The work of Donald Graves, Murray, Hindley, Calkins, Routman, Fletcher, just to name a few, have all helped me to become a teacher of writing. In Texas I taught fourth grade for five years, and in Texas,we have a fourth grade writing test, and it is a big deal. I worked with teachers who gave all day writing prompts, and I remember walking by those classrooms, and hearing nothing because students were not allowed to talk, only write, and feeling so bad for the boys and girls in those rooms who had to write about something every single Monday, that they could care less about. I vowed to never be one of those teachers. During writing time, my lights were low, Mozart played andkids were sitting in comfortable places around the room Asa teacher in Texas, I never had a student fail the writing test, in fact my scores were always high. My thinking behind that concurs with the article that writing should be meaningful tied to reading and allow for students to build their craft. Last year I met Ralph Fletcher,he spent the day talking about the power of the notebook, and how important it is for students to see themselves as writers. As Lucy Calkins says "Students need to live the writerly life."
In my kindergarten class a lot of the writing is a response to the white board News. I have a topic, generally fron Harcourt. We discuss it. We do a shared write. I help pose a question. We talley responses to the question. and then with some vocabulary help, we draw and write on the topic. I often collect the student work, and the following day students have time to finish, and or revise. In a way they have ownership, and are also able to complete a better looking product.
I used the website and found a lesson on verbs. In this lesson you review what a verb is and create a list of verbs as a class that corresponds to the letters of the alphabet. I had each student brainstorm and come up with at least 15 verbs that start with a different letter. Once the students did this, they were able to share with their group. The group then came up with the sentences and made the group book. The books are available for all the students to read. I found a few students would go to the books when we were writing so that they could find a ver that would make their writing better. We did a similar activity to this with compound words. The kids really enjoy making the books.
This is my first year teaching. My class did a writers workshop on how to write freindly notes. We went through the entire writing process. I used chart paper to show each step of the writing process (to help guide my students through each step). I tracked their progress through clothes pins so they could see thenmselves move through each step on the list. My class had a hard time with the editing and copying onto clean paper. I am looking forward to doing it again with them.