Hello!! I hope you boys are having a wonderful week in your placements so far! This weeks post is about teaching writing to your students, while attempting to make it interesting, fun, and meaningful. Seems like quite the task, right??
On
Pg. 149, Routman states that, “students learn the language of writing
(organization, sentence, fluency, voice) but aren’t helped to understand what
good writing is. When writing
workshop becomes a set of procedures or isolated writing traits, out students
just go through the motions…Teachers are trained in how to teach the individual
aspects of writing, and they, in turn, teach these to their students…Students
get lots of practice writing sentences and paragraphs, but their overall
writing does not necessarily improve”.
This
paragraph in particular really stuck out to me, especially because the actual
process of teaching writing and how to actually go about writing has suddenly
begun to feel incredibly overwhelming.
I honestly do not remember being taught how to write, I have always loved
to read, and because I had been spending so much time reading, writing was
something that came rather naturally to me in school. So far this year in my internship, I find myself at time
getting frustrated with my 5th graders with what I am seeing in aspects
of their writing so far. Simple
things like capitalizing all of the first letters in the words of a title are
things that are being missed, and some of them do not even understand the
concept of indenting a paragraph.
How do we as teachers stress the importance of these basic grammatical
rules without making writing seem like a boring list of rules? Writing, just like reading, is
something that many children do not like to do because they are not good at
it. Helping students improve with
their writing will help them to better enjoy doing it, but the task of making
writing seem like fun without being a strict rule setter seems almost
impossible at this point.
I
found it very interesting that on pg. 161 Routman specified the importance of
not just reciting conventions to students, but explaining to them why they
matter. If you are simply telling
students to capitalize the first words in their title, it might not be
something that really sticks with them.
But, if you explain to them that you did not know it was their title
because this capitalization was not done, the rule might make more sense, and
may be more likely to be followed through on the students next try. This fits really nicely in with the mini
lessons Routman was talking about in this chapter, and I feel like mini lessons
focused on writing would be very helpful to keep in mind for a classroom in
general, but especially for my students this year. I feel like my students would really benefit from this new
way to approach learning how to write, especially if more individualized
attention would be a part of that.
I
know that I have still really not seen a whole lot of Language Arts instruction
in my classroom, but what kinds of LA are you guys seeing in your
classroom? If you have seen any,
are you seeing more mini lessons, or whole group instruction? Do you feel like your students would
benefit from mini lessons when approaching the subject of learning to
write? Have you seen writing from
your students? If so, what kinds
of things are you seeing? I know
that when I first saw writing my students had done, I was surprised at the low
quality of the work that they had produced, and then of course I immediately
felt awful for thinking that way about my students. I want to help my students improve in their writing, but the
question of how to do that while creating a positive outlook about writing at
the same time seems like quite the uphill battle. How are you guys feeling about this task?
I totally agree with the part where you say that students who may struggle with writing are usually the ones who are most bored when we being writing tasks, yet they are the ones who more often than not need to be learning the materials to help them to become better writers. I too do not remember "learning" to read and write, but unlike some of the students we are experiencing in our classrooms this year, I was never so bored to death with writing that I would not be able to form complete sentences, indent paragraphs, or other "basic" writing skills that we would expect students in 5th grade to know. One suggestion I have with making writing more fun for the students would involve real life application and the use of technology. In my classrooms, I have had kids complain saying that they don't need legible penmanship, need to spell words correctly, need for capitalization and punctuation, or daily writing activities because these problems can be solved by the use of new technology and computer editing. Realistically, I think to make writing more fun, I would try to make it more real life applicable by creating writings in the forms of emails, or some other computer based assignment.
ReplyDeleteLet's face it, technology does have the potential to change the whole dynamic of writing within the classroom, but we still should stress the importance of hand writing in the forms of journals, freewrites, letters, and papers. As Chapter 8 says, the need for writing structure is essential to all learning, and the strategies to be applied and learned cannot be eliminated by the use of new technology. I feel the best way to do this is to keep up with strong demonstration writing, no matter how fun or boring, the material is too important to try to solve with a computer.
In the classroom we too have done little (if any) good solid writing instruction and practice. It would be nice to work with smaller group students on individual levels for mini-writing lessons, but in reality with the amount needed to get covered before the MEAP, its much easier to give whole class writings and then grade them with little one-on-one feedback. I wish it were different, but time is certainly one of the greatest factors my mentor teacher and I have been battling.
Wow Kelsey, you really hit home for the blog this week. I have noticed so many things in my classroom with literacy and also have some thoughts of my own. What I've noticed when it comes to free writes, brainstorming, writing for responses, the kids do have a general style in their writing. Their writing is usually precedented on what we ask, or we tell them. What I have noticed about their own personal style was how much voice each student really puts into their writing.
ReplyDeleteSince switching into the 4th grade (as of monday, sorry fellow 5th grade teachers) we have only been able to do a few things in writing. Beyond all the rules and procedures which we have to reteach and structure to them, their writing seems to be something that they really are interested in. We try really hard to work on writing neatly, spacing correctly, correct grammar and punctuation, but getting personal style and voice in to their writing is never really influenced. I feel that we have a group that like to read and write more than they do for math, which is good when it comes to my Literacy Unit planning, but also is going to make me try and push their limits and see what they're capable of.
Another issue you touched on was that of reciting to them the importance of explaining. I think that my class really needs to understand the context in which they're reading or writing things for. To be able to see really good writing and structure, we will definitely need to touch on this.
When it comes to writing and structure, we mostly focus on doing it when it comes to either Spelling, MEAP responses, or just practicing writing on our personal white boards. I believe that we are going to start up more in depth writing coming up, but I don't think that it has been a main focus because of our switch.
I really like how Matt incorporated how technology has its positives and negatives when looking at writing. I don't think we are going to touch on it too much when looking strictly at writing, but I know we will try to type up some of our personal writings throughout the year.
I know my post this week has been kind of all over, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly where our students stand and still going through testing (again!).