Monday, September 17, 2012
Week 2
I think that in order to take Routman's advice on teaching writing I would need to develop a sense of what is essential versus what is not. She says that, "...those skills need to be taught because the writer needs them to convey a message, not because they are on a checklist or in a prescribed 'scope and sequence' program" (Writing Essentials p.12). It is important to become an expert in helping create meaningful writing. What is meaningful to one set of students may not apply to the next so it is important to discover what makes meaningful writing and how to determine what students deem meaningful.
I especially want to focus on the integration of writing and basic skills because writing scores in my school are so low. In fact my third grade group decided to work on integrating writing into our social studies and science lessons whenever possible. Finding ways to do this can be tricky We decided a good way to do this and check for their understanding at the same time is to practice summary writing. Routman says, "One of the most effective ways to teach reading comprehension is by asking students to write summaries" (Writing Essentials p.127). She also points out the importance of teaching how to construct a summary. I am excited to start to become more familiar with teaching this writing as well as how it works with their lessons. I think the struggle with integrated these subjects is finding a good balance of time for writing and the subject matter. The students only have a total of 2 hours a week of social studies and 2 hours of science. I look forward to finding ways to make this work to our advantage.
I would like to try writing in our science and social studies and focusing on content while there and then take some time during our writers workshop to polish a piece. This would give extra time to writing and science and repeated exposure.
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I agree with Whitney's comment that we need to be able to distinguish what is essential and what is not when it comes to writing. That way, we can focus on and teach our students what they will need to be successful writers, and not just what will help them "pass the standardized test". Routman even says that "the more students work on writing a paragraph in isolation because writing a well-constructed paragraph s on the state test, the worse their paragraph writing usually becomes." (p. 154) This is interesting to me since there is such a big push to have our students do well on these standardized tests. Schools get money for doing well, so why wouldn't we want our students to do well? Why wouldn't we, therefore, "teach to the test"? If our goal is to help our students become better writers, then it appears as though teaching writing in isolated parts (as many curriculums indicate and what I remember being taught) is not the best way to teach our students. This is something I am excited to learn more about this year through observing my mentor teacher and attempting new ideas during my lead teaching time.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Whitney, when you talk about integrating writing into the science and social studies times. I especially think it was interesting to listen to our mentor teacher and the other third grade teacher talk about ways that they are going to try to incorporate writing into their teaching. I was a little surprised to listen to them say that they didn't have a lot of time for writing, since they had to focus a lot on reading/phonics. I am interested to see the kinds of ideas they come up with to integrate writing into science and social studies. I like your suggestion of continuing work on a piece they write in science/social studies during their writing workshop time. Routman suggests that we let our students write as much as possible, but to also give them opportunities to see the importance of revising and editing. She talks a lot in chapter 7 about how we as teachers need to focus on teaching writing whole-to-part-to-whole so that students will see the purpose behind writing and will be motivated to do well. For example, we can't just talk about having students revise a piece of writing without them first writing a piece and seeing why revising is helpful to their readers. With this understanding, students can them internalize the revising process so that they begin to do it for a purpose and out of habit. This is the whole-to-part-to-whole process that Routman talks about.
I think that it is great that you are looking for ways to integrate writing into the other subjects that are being taught in your class. This is something that I am also trying to focus on in my classroom because I feel that it is a great way for students to see the big picture of lessons and to see how all of their learning can be connected. You can also use real world examples to create meaningful lessons for the students that implement many different subjects.
ReplyDeleteI have recently seen my MT create more meaningful writing experiences for the students in my classroom. Today they were going to be learning how to write compare and contrast essays. To do this, students were put in partners and were each given a venn diagram with two circles on it. The first circle is where they would put traits that one partner had. The other circle was to contain different traits that the other partner had. Where they overlapped was things that they had in common. Once they had the diagram filled out, they used it to write their compare and contrast essays. This was really meaningful for the students in many ways. Since they had to interview their partner, this helped them get to know their classmates better. They also were able to share things about themselves to new people. And as we all know, 4th graders love to talk and write about themselves. :) Overall, I felt like there were many good things about this lesson that helped students partake in a meaningful writing activity.
It seems as if I have the opposite problem as Whitney, in regards to writing. I am trying to find ways to integrate Science and Social Studies into our Writing because there is not much time in our schedule for Science and SS. My school has a mission to get the students writing at grade level, so they are requiring teachers to try and do writing on a daily basis. Since we have been doing writing so often, I have been able to work with students at a variety of levels in their writing and I can see that we have a lot of work to do.
ReplyDeleteAs far as meaningful writing experiences, I'm not sure how well we've been incorporating these into our classroom. Our students have only been taught writing in Spanish up until this point, so this is the first time they have been writing in English. We are really focusing on just the basic ideas of writing, and spelling basic words. I know that we could make the writing activities that we do more meaningful, so I will be working on that in the near future.
It is interesting to see how not only different schools are working with differentiating/integrating writing but also within schools. Great thinking everyone!
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