Book Discussion #3

Krista Milen, Tina Hatcher, Crystal Lawrence

The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins

     Our group read pp. 285-517 from Lucy Calkins’ book this week. Chapter 18 dealt with editing and the best way to approach it during writer’s workshop.  She discussed how many kids come to us thinking writing is a display of spelling, penmanship, and punctuation and they will focus more on that than the content.  We all three have seen this happen in our classrooms. Students will just freeze up on spelling a word or where to put punctuation and then forget what they are even writing about.  Calkins stresses in this chapter that we need to help them write freely and unselfconsciously.  No one learns well while feeling afraid and ashamed.  We need to let students realize it’s ok to make editorial errors as they write; all of us do, and then we correct them as we edit.  She states that the best thing we can for their syntax, spelling, penmanship, and use of mechanics is to help them write more often and with confidence. When she launches writer’s workshop, she tells them their notebooks aren’t meant to be displays of perfect spelling and handwriting.  It’s a place for deep thoughtful ideas and careful observation.  Our group agrees that young students need to focus, above all, on what they are saying and let spellings come out naturally. We liked her quote, “This is a rough draft. It is meant to be rough.  There will be a time for making it beautiful.”  Some other ideas/comments we liked when writing rough drafts:

-Let them use a pen or pencil

-If too much time being spent making letters perfect, she might say,” No erasing allowed- Just cross out and keep going.”

-She might show students one of her first drafts

-When children keep asking how to spell a word, they keep asking because you keep giving them the answer.  They need strategies for spelling words.  Say the word.  How many parts in the word? Now listen for the sounds in the words.

    It was also interesting the research she did among two third-grade classrooms comparing how they were taught writing.  Ms. West taught mechanics through daily drills and workbook exercises.  She started at the very beginning, teaching simple sentences, periods, capitals.  She did pretests and post-tests, but the children rarely wrote.  In Ms. Howard’s class, the children wrote every day and chattered as writers do, about conventions of written language.  When Calkins met with the “writers” who had not had formal instruction in punctuation, they could explain an average of 8.66 kinds of punctuation, whereas writers who had studied punctuation every day through classwork and drills could only explain 3.85 kinds of punctuation.  Even more important, children in the writing classroom liked punctuation.  Calkins stresses that when children view themselves as writers, like students in Ms. Howard’s class, they see punctuation everywhere.  They start noticing it and becoming familiar with it.  The nonwriters described punctuation by trying to remember the rules they’d been taught. How many of us do this?  We get bogged down writing as adults because we can’t remember the rules or how to spell a word. Many of us were not taught to write “freely” and our first draft was our final draft.  We wanted it perfect the first time. 

    She discussed one way to help students edit is by giving them a checklist to go over before they turn their work in. The one she gave was very simple and we can see ourselves using it with our students. When conferencing with students, notice the things a student can do and only pick out one or 2 things for the student to work on as a writer.  We liked the idea of having a sheet of paper in their writing folder and jotting down what you notice and the one thing that student is working on.  Calkins also stresses that kids need to know that when authors finish their writing, they move on to another piece. 

    

     We discussed that poetry is a powerful genre because of its condensed nature. Every child in the classroom can be a poet, because poems can be very short. We liked how she allowed the children to use pieces from their notebooks to turn those in to poems.

     We all loved the section on Making Memoirs Out of the Pieces of Our Lives. Virginia Wolfe said, “A memoir is not what happens, but the person to whom things happen.” We all agreed that Memoirs will be a great way to really get to know our students, because we will learn their feelings, ideas, and insights rather than just reading about an event. The stage of writing memoirs is described by Randy Bomer as the stage of “shoving kids out of the nests.” He says this because they are forced out of their notebooks into a draft. They suggest that the easiest way to do this is by setting a deadline for a draft.

    In chapter 25, Calkins discussed how we used to do research from an encyclopedia, but today research starts out with what we experience and what we know instead.  She said we should tell our students to seek out new life experiences and relationships, which will help them to learn more, and to find more to write about.  We enjoyed the quote from Jean Fritz in this chapter, “As human beings, we thrive on astonishment.  Whatever is unknown quickens us, delivers us from ourselves, impels us to investigate, inspires us to imagine.”  We should watch out for surprise and mystery, these things will make for good nonfiction stories. 

    She discussed how we should create conditions in our classrooms to help the ‘learning’ happen.  We can’t ‘make’ students learn, but we can encourage them to ask questions, to notice and wonder, and to inquire about the world around them.  Writing is a way to do these things. Writing throughout the day can be used to develop meaning and compose ideas about different topics.  Some ways to use writing that interested us were:

·      Writing to learn journals – add short journal writing activities into the classroom throughout the day to help them develop their thoughts and ideas

·      Take a few minutes to write down what we are thinking about a topic – this helps reel them back in if they have tuned out of a whole-class discussion

·      Have them summarize the ‘essence of the issue’ – use these summaries to get them actively participating in the class discussion

·      Write down what we know or wonder about a topic before you start discussing a new one

·      They can use writing as a tool for thought

·      “The main thing we’re talking about is…” – is helpful to stimulate a whole-class discussion

·      “The main thing I’m talking about is…” - is used for individual self-motivation

·      Writing can encourage students to ask questions and problem-solve in any content area

·      Write to support their reflections on their guesses and predictions during lessons

    Calkins describes ways to make our students into active learners through their writing in this book.  She talks about how much our teaching matters, and what a big responsibility it is to teach our students wisely.  We discussed how important our teaching is, and how we want to use more of the writing techniques from this book to grow as teachers.  We are teachers because we love our students.  How better to show them our love for them, than by expressing our love of learning through writing?

Theoretical Group Response #3

Heather, Tracy and I discussed the articles on comprehension.  We talked about the reading strategies that were presented in the articles and how theses strategies are helpful to mold students into expert readers.  We talked about how these needs are being better addressed in our school since we began using guided reading.  The question was posed on how do we do a quick check for comprehension if the students can not get their summary to paper?  We could sit down with each individual child, but that would be very time consuming in a very cramped day already.  This just proves how reading and writing go hand in hand.  We should not teach these as two different subjects, because really you can't do one without the other.  We liked how Stahl presented the research based strategies and how some is used by teachers and some is not.  The KWL chart that so many teachers use in their daily classrooms doesn't have any research to prove its effectiveness.

These articles were insightful and helpful.  I  am particularly fond of Neufeld's article and the last helpful hints that he gives to help carry out comprehension instruction.

• Teaching a few comprehension strategies well is more effective that teaching many strategies poorly. (Brown,2002)
• Teach students to use strategies flexible, adapting them to their needs, their individual preferences, and the text at hand (Pressley, 2002)
• Remember that reading comprehension strategies are a means to an end and not the end.  The end is helping students become expert comprehenders of challenging texts.
• Students need many opportunities to practice the strategies they are learning. (Brown, 2002)

After reading these articles, I know that I need to give explicit instruction and model how to use the strategies to become expert readers.  This is a very difficult task for some beginning readers especially those who are lacking background knowledge.  

Book Club

Book Club

Krista Milen, Tina Hatcher, Crystal Lawrence

The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins

  Our book club this week read pages 59-287 from Lucy Calkins.  The first part dealt with the foundations of literacy (writing in the home, nursery school and kindergarten).  She emphasized that oral language “takes place on a non-sequence, whole-task basis.”  We wouldn’t  dissect oral language into component parts  and we shouldn’t drill young children on all the sounds of the alphabet before inviting them to write. We should treat early writing with respect just like we would a baby’s first words. She says when launching a writing workshop in the primary-level classroom teachers to accept whatever they may put down.. Children don’t need to be afraid they will “fail” but need to be accepted and praised for what they can do.  We liked how she addressed the students as “writers”  Calkins also stresses that children’s drawing is rehearsal for them.  It plays an important role in that it provides a supportive scaffolding within which can help children write.  They can return to their drawing and most of the child’s meaning is carried by the picture.  Calkins later discourages drawing, as a way of rehearsing for writing because she says that no solution works for every child and not solution should works forever.  She says we should watch for signs indicating that a child no longer needs to weave drawing and writing together.  She states that drawing is a predominant form of rehearsal for many 1^st graders, but talking is the most effective form of rehearsal for 2^nd grade.  We all three liked the idea of notebooks in primary grades.  They have it with them throughout the day and go home with them at night.  It is a place for gathering bits and pieces of their lives.  She also states that peer conferences may not get better writing, but longer texts. 

            Calkins went on the discuss Writer’s Workshop in the upper elementary grades.  We discussed how a lot of students are no longer comfortable to really get in to their writing due to peer pressure and bullying.  We all agreed that students at this age need us to care about them and what is going on in their lives outside of the classroom.  Building a community is especially important at this level of Writer’s Workshop.  When building the community we must demonstrate our love for reading and writing. This is the age to make the reading/ writing connection. Students at this age still apply some of our values to their lives.  We agreed with Calkins when she said that launching Writer’s Workshop with students in secondary grades is difficult.  The teacher in Secondary Writing Workshops must build one on one relationships, seize the moment and teach on your toes, encourage students to voice themselves through writing, and see the energy in the classroom and go with it.

            We agreed that in order for Writer’s Workshop to work it must be predictable.  Teachers must be organized, and set-aside particular times every day.  “It is almost impossible to have a successful writing workshop if students write only one or two times per week.  We like the components of Writer’s Workshop.  We discussed the mini lesson, work time, conferencing, share sessions and publication.  The mini lesson is just what it says.  This is the time that is set aside to “teach” all the students something. We shouldn’t expect for every student, however, to use what was taught that in his or her papers.  There is not a set curriculum on what to teach in the mini lessons.  Teachers must decide what to teach based on the needs of the students that she is teaching.  A problem that teachers face with mini lessons is that teachers often struggle with reverting to the “old” way of teaching at this time.  We all agreed that we must remember who ever is doing the most talking is doing the most learning.

         We had a lot of favorite things about the book to discuss when we met.  One of the sections we all agreed upon was the section on mini-lessons of revisions.  Crystal told the us that she especially enjoyed the phrase by William Faulkner, “Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind” (Calkins, page 209).  The sense of urgency he discusses is what it is like when students are writing their first draft.  They need to get the ideas all down on paper quickly before they forget what their ideas were in the first place.  I will list a few of the recommended strategies for topics of mini-lessons here:

·      Write about a subject in a different genre

·      Rework a confused section- the ending, the title, etc

·      Take a long draft and make it shorter

·      Take a short entry of a draft and expand it

·      Imagine a purpose and an audience for it

·      Reread the draft evaluating what works and what does not

·      Read the entries/draft and think, ”Where’s the mystery here?”

·      Put the draft aside and return to it another day

·      Take a jumbled piece and rewrite it in sections or chapters

These are just a few of the strategies that we found would be most helpful to our age group of students.  (Calkins, pages 209-210)

         In the chapters on ‘conferring’, one phrase stood out to me that I shared with my group.  “Creation and criticism- these are central to our work with clay and blocks, and they are also central to our work with words.” (Calkins, page 222)  In these chapters of the book, Calkins was discussing how important it is to question themselves about their writing.  As readers, we should ask a question or two about our drafts. No matter the age, questions like these can be used over and over.

·      What have I said so far?

·      How do I like it? What is not so good that I can fix?

·      How does it sound? How does it look?

·      How else could I have done this?

·      What am I going to do next?

These are some questions that can be discussed during teacher-student or peer conferences to get a student to learn to interact with their own writing.  The goal for the teacher, over time, is to be unnecessary or unneeded. We want students to be successful at self-questioning.

         We enjoyed the different stories and anecdotes in this book.  There was a particular story about a little boy named Noah on pages 262-263 that was meaningful to me so I shared it with my book club group. The story was in the chapter on publications.  Calkins was sharing how the 5 year old had written a 10-page book, with words and a picture on each page.  After reading his book to the class, his teacher asked him what he had written on the back of the book.  He told her that it was “nuthin”, just “sumfin” for the library.  He had put symbols for the section of the library that it would go into for the librarian.  This is humorous, yet significant, because he already sees himself as an author.  As Calkins says, “His teacher has not only helped him develop skills, she has also helped him develop a self-concept as an author.” (Calkins, page 263)  We want our students to not only act as writers, but to become one.  To see him/herself as an author causes the children to make connections with the books they read.  When they make connections, they are learning.

Response to Theoretical Discussion #2

In our theoretical discussion group, we spent a lot of time discussing Dr. Allington's article.  As Heather  and Tracy both put it, it was an eye opening reading.  We all agreed that expertise matters.  Teachers who are not experts rely on products to get their students ready for tests trying to make up for what was not effective in their teaching through the year.  We also got in to the discussion about how it takes 35 to 50 years of research for things to change in education.  Allington states that effective teachers give their students longer assignments involving choice.  The students are working on similar, but different tasks.  I know several students that this has worked on, but I didn't allow it for all students.  I only did this with students who stubbed up on assignments.  Most of the time their attitude changed when I offered them something else to do that was basically the same assignment!  The section on testing said that effective teachers gave grades based on effort and improvement.  This is wonderful, because the students who don't have to try hard don't and the ones who try so hard often get frustrated when they don't receive high grade.  

The article by Valencia-Buly, was talking about how students who struggle in reading are not all the same.  Some students need decoding instruction, while others need exposure to vocabulary, some students need to read books on their level to enhance their fluency.  This article gave examples of children from the six groups that the fourth graders were categorized.

These articles were eye opening reads this week.  Dr. Allington's article is one that every teacher should read.  We are in the business of education children and are life long learners ourselves.  

Our book club is reading "The Art of Teaching Writing."Crystal, Krista and I read section one "The Essentials of Writing."  This section is about getting Writer's Workshop started and to communicate to your students the excitement you have for writing. On the first pages she said that writing is not desk work, it is life work!  We all three loved how she was so enthusiastic about her writer's notebook. She did an amazing job communicating just how special that notebook is to her.  On the first days of school she told them "you have so much to say," "you are authors."  This really gives the students ownership of their writing.  Isoke used writer's workshop as a time to demonstrate the role writing plays in her life and to invite students to join her in living the writerly life.  We like how she establishing norms in the classroom, rather than just writing expectations on the board. This is definitely an area in which I have failed.  We liked how she compared how the writing process to a seed.

Krista and I will be focusing on teaching Writer's Workshop this year.  I still have many questions on how I will incorporate this in my classroom.  We will be teaching K-2 of a 120 students each.  I feel that it will be a challenge, but I am looking forward to it.  In the chapter about revision, I have never looked at it in the same way that she does.  I have been guilty of referring to revision as fixing the mistakes, but she points out that revision is looking at a piece of writing and getting new ideas from it.  

Response to Theoretical Readings #1

Heather, Tracy and myself discussed the articles that were assigned this week.  It was nice to talk about how our school is using a "balanced" approach to literacy.  BES is using what is described by Cunningham as the four blocks reading program.  This past school year, we implemented guided reading and read to self through the Daily Five.  In the upcoming school year we will be adding Writer's Workshop and Words Their Way. We discussed how we implement homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping of our students in K-2 with our scheduling.  This can be very difficult to do in classrooms with 22 children.  Tracy complemented the teachers in our school by saying that he feels that the teachers in our building have a good "tool box" to meet the needs of all learners.  Everyone is different, therefore it takes different methods to reach all the students.  We also talked about how when working with small children especially that one day a method may work and the next day it will not. It is important to pay attention to the children and it is okay to have teachable moments.  Sometimes you must stop a lesson and give them some background knowledge especially when you are teaching children from poverty areas.  When comparing Method A and Method B, Tracy posed the questions "Why not do both?"  One of the last things that we talked about was this statement, "teacher education is ongoing, not short term".  This is so true.  I believe that I can say that every teacher in our building has definitely learned something new this year!

While I was reading these two articles, I started thinking about how much things have changed in what I teach and how I teach it since I started teaching just six years ago.   In the article "In pursuit of an illusion:  The flawed search for a perfect method,"  I couldn't help but think of a wonderful reading teacher who gave me some great advice.  She said, "Keep what worked from your old reading series, and use it in the place of what doesn't work from the new reading series."  She lived by this rule.  She used materials that she had in the early 80's. 

Tina Hatcher's Reading Profile

Tina Hatcher

Response to Blog Post #1

• The things that I read most often are school related articles, the newspaper,and children's books to my six year old little girl.
• For fun I like to read Sappy Love Stories and how to landscaping/gardening books.
• I hate to read things that are not exciting and gives irrelevant information.
• I read in lots of different places.  I like to get up early and read outside on my deck, I move around from room to room depending on where my children are playing.
• I read most often early in the morning.  This is when my mind is clear and I can focus best.
• Most of the reading that I do is for my personal children, and my students.
• When I was a little girl probably around four years old, I remember my ma-maw sitting in her sun room reading the little golden books to me while my older brother and sister were at school.
• I remember learning to read in the first grade and it was a very intimidating experience for me.

Practice

Practice