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.