A Closer Look at Writing

This week in my field placement, I substitute taught for the morning in place of my CT. Mornings in this classroom are generally filled with literacy block. Part of this literacy block is the centers rotation, during which the teacher normally facilitates reading groups. This week, I ran centers and reading groups as usual and I was able to meet with three different groups for twenty minutes. I chose a book from the box that the readers in each group were working on. After we finished reading the book, I asked students a few comprehension questions about the story. Finally, I gave students lined paper and asked them to write at least one sentence about the story. I told them it could be anything they wanted: a sentence about what happened in the story, what they liked or didn’t like about the story, or perhaps they could make something up about what might happen next. Also, I told them they could reference the story by looking back, but that I preferred they did not simply copy a sentence from the text, rather, I was hoping they would write something original.

I chose to look at a writing sample from one girl, who I will refer to as M, for this blog post. Her writing sample reads: “Cat way at the party and gig it way fox’s party lets jog says fox thay won’t get up!” When I asked her what she wrote, she read this back to me: “Cat was at the party and pig. It was fox’s party. ‘Let’s jog!’ says fox. They won’t get up!” It is evident to me from this writing sample that M has a lot to say! The sentence she wrote about is obviously a run-on that should be broken up into at least four sentences. According to Tompkin’s six qualities of good writing, M has developed some good habits already, but has plenty of room for further growth. I would characterize her has being proficient in developing ideas and in employing her own voice in her writing: M builds on the plot of the text, adding emphasis and voice to parts with which she identified most. M needs some practice with organization, and word choice, but I think the areas in which M needs the most work are sentence fluency and mechanics. As one sentence, M’s writing is hardly comprehendible, yet broken into separate sentences, the content seems choppy and non-cohesive. Working on her sentence fluency could help M develop the content of her writing while simultaneously developing skills to improve her style as well. Finally, it is evident that M is lacking some spelling and punctuation habits in her writing. While she does include an apostrophe and an exclamation mark, both of which indicate practice with punctuation, M fails to include more basic elements of punctuation, like commas, periods, and capital letters. These pieces could highly improve the stylistic elements of M’s writing, which would, in turn, allow her the space and ability to further expand on her idea development and organization, as well as word choice and voice.

Writing in Kindergarten

Writing in my Kindergarten classroom has developed from learning about letters and what sounds they make, phoneme-grapheme correspondences, to finally using their knowledge to form words that they think sound right. They are all still emergent readers except for a select few who can read books designed for beginning readers. Writing is still very closely connected to reading. The only writing that I see in my Kindergarten classroom is the writing of their name, labeling of a drawing they made during an activity, or copying of words onto lines that are already printed on the page. We have a center during literacy center time called “The Clipboard Cruise” where they have to walk around the classroom writing down words that they see. I am not sure the validity of the center because I know that sometimes they may not be reading what they are copying down onto their paper. What I do like seeing, however, is when they students are copying down word wall words that are frequently used such as: I, am, he, she. It, play, ball, etc.
Going back to the basics, every Kindergartener is at a sufficient level when it comes to their concepts of print. They know which way the words go, when to put spaces before words, where punctuation should go (basics such as periods and question marks), and they can begin sentences with a capital letter.
I think what helps is the shared reading time that our CT involves our students in each day. They are immersed with writing all around them. The Clipboard Cruise helps them be even more surrounded and familiar with words and writing words on paper. Our CT is doing everything right with our emergent readers. Our only worry, though, is that when they are presented with a book with a lot of words on one page, it overwhelms them. They are able to recognize a single word such as “see” on a single piece of paper. But if they saw a sentence that read, “I see a dog.” They would stare blankly at it and not take the risk to try and sound out the sentence.
What I would like to see more of when they do activities is that they would begin to start writing brief and simple sentences to explain their drawing. This would push them to take risks and sound out the words they want to write on paper. We do not see enough of this when we are in the classroom on Wednesdays. We know that there is a writing teacher that does come into the classroom at 2pm every Wednesday, so we assume the bulk of their writing during the week happens then, but we never see it because we leave Lyons Elementary right at 2pm.

Writing Instruction

When looking at the writing in my placement classroom, I feel that many things are working. First, I think the fact that they have time set aside for writers workshop everyday is extremely important and effective. They never overlook writing and showing students the importance of frequent writing is very helpful in their overall written development. However, I feel that many of the writers workshops are very similar, not allowing for much variety in their writing styles. Most often, students are asked to write personal narritives. After some time, students began to grow board of writing about themselves. Once my CT changed the topic to writing on Desperoux, students began developing their writing more. Therefore, in my classroom I would strive to create more variety in my writers workshop in order to allow for more creativity from my students as well as engaging them in the writing activities.

In addition to writers workshop, my students participate in "buzzy the bee journal." Every three days one student gets to bring buzzy the bee (a stuffed animal) home and is asked to write about what they did with buzzy. When they bring the journal back, students share what they wrote with the class. They are more than welcome to draw pictures and there is no length requirement, allowing students to feel less pressure. This is an opportunity my CT has created for students to share their work which in turn allows them to feel that their writing is being valued by their peers and teacher. This is also an element in writers workshop, that Tompkins discusses, and it is one of my favorite ways writing is incorporated into my classroom. I would keep this type of sharing and the relaxed feel that students have when they are sharing their work. This is a way for students to have their work celebrated in the classroom and allows engagement from all students.

One element I would like to see more in my placement classroom would be the qualities of good writing that Tompkins discusses in chapter 2 to be more explicitly encouraged and taught. She talks about organization of ideas, voice, word choices, sentence fluency, and mechanics. The only aspect I see explicitly discussed in my classroom is mechanics (capital letters, punctuation, etc.) I think it would improve students writing if they were encouraged to use their voices more or vary their sentences with better word choices. I loved the idea of a "banned word" for a few days. I think this really promotes variety in word choices and could increase vocabulary for students. It could also work as a challenge for students, increasing their engagement and motivation in their writing. I think that these qualities of good writing need to be more present in the classroom in order for them to be worked into the students writing, especially during writers workshop. However, overall I feel that writing is fairly strong in my classroom but could be further improved to engage students more and make them really enjoy writing.

Writing Instruction in the Classroom

As we talked about writing instruction in class discussion yesterday, I was trying to remember the types of writing I see in my field. The only writing our students ever to is a couple times a week for about 15 minutes before lunch. They write stories that have happened to them before and the stories have to have a beginning, middle and end. About once a month our students pick one of the stories they have written that they want published. They go through the story to look for errors then they have the teacher edit it and then in their best handwriting they rewrite the story on publishing paper. I think this is a really good process that the students are learning, but it frustrates me that they only stick to the same genre and that they are always doing the same assignment. I think the students would benefit a lot by writing about other things. The only other time they write in class is on worksheets from science or social studies.

Also, writing time often gets pushed aside to do other activities like continuing centers or doing IOWA practice. I think the students are really loosing out on writing because their program is so reading focused I think they need more of a balance of both. It is great that the students are learning the writing process, but I think they need to practice more and with more subjects.

After talking about writing in class yesterday there a some elements of writing I would like to see in my own classroom. I read Tompkins chapter 14 this week, I really enjoyed the ideas for putting reading and writing together. I used to be a horrible writer, but an avid reader and eventually my reading helped my writing. I think that the two subjects are very closely related. Students would benefit a lot by writing about what they read and vise versa, and I think this needs to be incorporated in all subjects, not just language arts. I would love to see writing and reading incorporated into all subjects. Also books on subjects like science and social students can be incorporated into language arts. By combining genres and subjects students understand that everything overlaps, just like it does in the real world. I think that writing is so important and it will be a major part of my classroom. I wish that the students in my field placements had more opportunities to write and share their ideas because writing really does create an avenue where students thoughts and ideas can be heard.

New Literacies Reflection

For my New Literacies project I chose to create an online comic on Environmental Literacy. At first I chose the new technology of an online comic because it looked completely different from what I was used to doing. It was not until I began the project that I realized that I needed to also practice the technology of websites and digital photos. First I downloaded a free 60 day trial of this program called Comic Life where you are able to turn your digital photos into a comic strip and alter the photos to look like a comic. That was a simple program to understand but I needed to get even more creative than that because digital photos are fine and dandy but how was I supposed to have people in them talking with thought bubbles? That's when I thought that I needed a narrator for my project and my Dwight Schrute bobble-head sitting on my desk looked like the perfect person for the job. I spent a few hours one day walking around campus taking photos of Dwight Schrute in various locations so it looked as if he was telling a story. I also had done the same thing previously with a "gift" for someone last summer so I had a ton of Dwight photos still on my computer from the previous summer sitting in trees and swing sets. After I had the comic up and running I needed to post it to a website, so to showcase my assignment I thought to just attach it to my website I had already created as a web portfolio. This was difficult to do because I did not want it to be confusing when you clicked on the hyperlink. It actually took a while to configure the comic to the page so it was easy for people to click on the first page and read the online comic.

I felt that the technology I chose fit my personality so well because I was able to be as creative as I could possibly be without the hindrance of HTML rules or website restrictions. I was able to let my personality take over my project in all its glory. This feeling of boundless possibilities gets me excited to think that if I made an assignment like this for upper elementary grades that the projects that I would receive back would be so unique and original! If I had a blast taking my Dwight Schrute bobble-head around taking pictures with it, I can only imagine how the students would feel if they got the same chance to do what I did.

However, I cannot say that this would be the case in the future when I teach. Who knows what kinds of households my students will come from and resources my students will have in the future. What I have is an ideal situation. Many projects using technology will have to be put to the side due to lack of funds and resources. Every teacher needs to teach to the group of students he or she has in the classroom. If the school has the resources and allows the students to borrow the supplies, perhaps my online comic could be something my future students could be able to implement as an assignment. Otherwise, other technologies would have to be used to ensure that each child has a chance to complete the assignment successfully.

I chose to study environmental literacy because that topic interests me the most and will have the most direct influence on my teaching if I gain a position as a 6-8 science teacher in the upcoming years. The research of environmental literacy is what interests me the most. Especially since I have read the book, Last Child In The Woods, by Richard Louv. This books defines exactly what I want to do as a teacher when it comes to the subject of science. The main purpose of his book and the main purpose of the Campaign For Environmental Literacy is to alert citizens that their actions affect the world around them. Richard Louv, primarily speaks about the research done on children who do not get the exposure to the outdoors as they grow up. Louv links this lack of nature to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression.

What this project has pushed me to do in the future is get the kids outdoors. I know that when I think about taking kids outdoors for a walk around the school (even if it was in the confines of the school property) the first thing that comes to mind is that they will go wild and not pay attention whatsoever. But just like any other classroom management, wouldn't one have to teach and model to the students the correct way to be "scientists" in the outdoors? Especially if you made this time a part of the natural weekly routine the students will begin to take this time learning outdoors seriously. I know it can be done with high school students because I was in a class junior year that went on ecology hikes once a week and we learned our native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers in all seasons and were assessed on how to identify them. If my teacher at the time could have us behave while learning outdoors, I can too create scientists out of my students as well. In my mind I know what I would want to do if I had the chance to make outdoor learning a part of my bi-weekly or even weekly routine, it just depends on how it would be taken by those above me in the school hierarchy. It would never be used in a way to keep the kids from going out of control like I have memories from, from elementary school. I would be providing environmental literacy to my students.

New Literacy Reflection

For my New Literacies Exploration project, I chose to create an informational website about Visual Literacy. Working first hand with this new literacy concept while using a new technology really changed my understanding of literacy even more than it has already evolved since the beginning of the semester.

On February 3rd, I made a blog post about Literacy, attempting to define it in what I thought were new terms. I first reflected on my previous conceptions of literacy as developed throughout my experiences in TE 150, 250, 301, and 401: “Literacy, for me, was the end goal of a step-by-step process of learning how to read. This included pronouncing phonemes, recognizing letters, concepts of print, and all these other pieces of the literacy process. After our discussion on 'What is Literacy?' and the readings concerning Literacy, though, I have come to realize that it is much more than that.” I went on to describe my ‘new’ conceptions of literacy. In reflection on this blog post, though I see that these ‘new’ conceptions still defined literacy as the ability to read, whether it was in terms of social functions or simply as a student reading in the classroom. Since then, however, I have grown and developed my definition of Literacy even further, especially after completing the New Literacies project. Because the literacy I learned about and reported on, Visual Literacy, is quite the opposite of reading words, I began to view Literacy with a much more broad perspective. As far as Visual Literacy is concerned, being literate is the ability to understand the world through images. These images can either be as simple as signs and symbols we use to navigate through our everyday lives, such as street signs, restroom signs, recycling symbols, map and map symbols, etc. Images can also be complex pictures, photographs, paintings and other works that have been specifically composed to convey a purpose or meaning that can be interpreted by a visually literate person. Finally, students can use visual literacy to communicate knowledge or meaning through drawings, thought webs, paintings, photographs, and more. After taking some time to explore some of my fellow colleagues’ new literacy projects, I now see that being literate is being able to understand the world in a fluent way, whether through reading, deciphering signs and pictures, understanding the needs of a healthy environment, social and political system or even communicating through use of emotions. All of these forms of literacy are relevant and can be used in critical ways in the classroom.

Another important aspect of literacy that I have come to understand through this project is being able to effectively communicate ideas, knowledge and understandings of the world around us. In the past, this meant by writing or drawing only, but now I view a wide range of technologies – such as blogs, scrapblogs, comics, and more - as modes of communicating ideas. As technology increasingly advances, the means by which students will be expected to fluently communicate and express themselves become more innovative and interactive. Students can use the technologies my colleagues and I explored to make their communication more interesting. Even posting in this blog has taught me a new way to express my opinions in a thoughtful and reflective way.

For me, learning how to create a website was a fun and exciting way to express my understanding of Visual Literacy. I chose to create a website because it was something I had never tried before and I had always been intimidated by the concept of using HTML. Fortunately, I found a great resource called ‘Weebly’ that allowed me to create and edit my webpage with a minimal use of HTML coding. In fact, I only used HTML to upload one thing on the site and even that was quite manageable. I felt so accomplished after having learned a new technology and having successfully created my own website. In order to use this technology, I needed to develop specific knowledge, capacity and commitment goals. I needed to know how to organize the information into different pages within my website. This required knowledge about how informational websites are usually structured and the ability to model mine accordingly. I had to understand what content was appropriate for which categories – i.e. what information belongs on the “About” page, and what information fits better in the “Importance” page. I also had to learn processes like how to upload this information, as well as pictures and videoclips to my website. It was very important that I understood how to cite the many sources I used in researching Visual Literacy. Finally, I needed to develop an optimistic and caring attitude about my Weebly site so I could make it look aesthetically pleasing, while being very informative, yet not overwhelming for me in the creating process.

As it relates to use in a K-8 classroom, this specific technology would require similar knowledge, objective and capacity goals as I found necessary in creating my own website. On a more basic level, though, students would need to know how to research and organize information before they even began to create an informational website. These are necessary processes for completing any sort of research-based report, but especially for using an advanced technology to communicate the information. If, for example, I required my first grade students to produce a website in order to demonstrate learning of the language arts lesson my teaching partner and I developed, students would have to be able to organize their thoughts first. Briefly, our lesson explored a text about the friendship between historical figures Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. Students were encouraged to make text-to-self connections in order to complete the instructed activity in which they each created their own friendship books. I think creating a website could enhance my students’ understanding of both the text and a new technology. One particular GLCE that we used in our lesson planning that would fit nicely into creating a website based on the lesson is: R.CM.01.03 compare and contrast relationships among characters, events, and key ideas within and across texts to create a deeper understanding by mapping story elements, graphically representing key ideas and details, and asking questions as they read. Students could feasibly create a website that introduces themselves on the homepage, and includes other tabbed pages such as, “About the Book,” “Characters,” “My Friendship Story,” and “About the Author.” A project like this may be more involved than what we had planned, but would require the same knowledge, capacity and commitment goals, as well as those previously discussed that are necessary for creating a web page.

In the future, I can absolutely imagine using website creation to not only inform my students but also to allow them to express their own thoughts, ideas, knowledge and understandings. This project has really opened my mind to a more comprehensive idea of what ‘Literacy’ means as well as how to teach all kinds of literacy in my classroom using a range of new technologies. I look forward to using mine and my colleagues’ projects as models from which I can formulate ideas for new lesson plans in my future classroom.

New Literacies Reflection

I chose was a scrap blog. I chose this technology because it is one of the only ones I had not worked with yet. I ended up really enjoying working with this technology. It let me use creative aspects to create a presentation that actually meant something. I really liked the backgrounds and pictures it provided and it also left a lot of room to add your own as well. I chose to do social literacy with this technology because I wanted to learn more about social literacy myself. I felt that a scrap blog was a good way to show this type of literacy because it gave me a way to show several examples of social literacy and well as present ways to use it in the class room. I thought about creating a social account on a site like blogger, or making a wiki, but I had already done these technologies before and I wanted to use something where I could show multiple examples. I really liked the way my presentation turned out. I think it show a lot of social literacy examples and it gave teachers a lot of tips to use in the classroom. I think using this type of technology in the classroom would be a lot of fun for students. It would let them show their thoughts about a subject with a lot of creativity. I like it a lot better than similar programs like power point. There are a lot more graphics to choose from and a lot more fonts and backgrounds. Overall I learned that this technology is very good to put together presentations with. It presents informative material in a fun and interesting way.

At the beginning of the semester I thought of literacy as just reading and writing. However, after our class on the definition of literacy, I began to think about it a little more. I think one main reading we did that made me broaden my thinking about literacy was the Critical Literacy article. I really liked how the teacher made a point of sharing different kinds of books with her students. She read books from all different cultures so her students got to learn a little more about people around the world. Another thing that also really changed my view on the definition of literacy was our class discussion. Our group started thinking about it and we decided that there is a whole range of possibilities about literacy. It could be reading and writing or it could be speaking and body language. As we explored new literacies further, I started thinking about how much we do on the internet and how we rely on that as a means of communication and knowledge so that is a form of literacy too. It is probably one of the fastest growing avenues of literacy and students are always searching online for something. Many teachers hesitate to bring the internet into the classroom, but I think it is a valuable resource and a important form of literacy that students should learn from. My thinking from the start of the semester has changed a great deal. I not only think of literacy as reading and writing. Now I think of literacy as any way people use to communicate or to gather knowledge. After researching social literacy, I think literacy is a forever expanding concept. Since we have all of this new technology today we are expanding our literacy into it. This is what I liked the most about social literacy. It is understanding all of those social networking and group editing sites we use online now. It is incorporating new technology into literacy. I do not think anyone can put a set definition on literacy. Everyone interprets literacy in their own way.

If I were to teach the technology I used in my current classroom, I think the students would first need to know a little more about computers. The students in my class do not use computers a lot so to jump into a program like this would be very intimidating for them. Also they would have to work on their spelling and writing on the computer. However I think with a little guidance they could put together a simple presentation. I think if I were to use this in the lesson I just taught it would have been really cool. They could have done something like made a couple of slides about feelings and how the characters in our story felt and maybe what they would do in a hurricane. They could use a template provided and just add in the text and some extra stickers out of the graphics. I think this type of technology would be amazing to use in higher grades like 3-7 because students in those grades really have more writing and computer skills and they would probably be able to put together a pretty nice presentation based on a book they were reading. To create a presentation like the one I created students would have to know how to upload pictures and to research information online. Upper elementary and middle school students already are doing this for fun at home so it would be good to input this into lessons. Having them create something they can put online and share with the class would be very beneficial for them. They would be learning about what they are presenting by having to look up information to put it into the scrapblog. For instance, if the class just read a novel like Number the Stars which is about the holocaust, the students could create a little presentation using scrapblog that tells about the holocaust and the characters in the book. This would make them think about the book more and really reflect on what they are reading. They would also be learning technology. I think technology is important in the classroom which is why I chose social literacy. Having the student make blogs and wikis allows them to express their thoughts with each other and others around the world. Part of the literacy assignment could be to post a blog about the book and then put a link to the blog into the scrapblog. This will allow the students to learn a little bit about the holocaust and then see what other members of their class think about the book. New technology is affecting so much in literacy it is important that students get the chance to use and learn from it to teach literacy effectively.