With the writing I have seen go on in my classroom, I have been fairly impressed. My MT has done a great job modeling ways of creating effective paragraphs. We have a great graphic hanging up in my classroom that depicts a great paragraph as a delicious hamburger. This graphic immediately intrigued and engaged my students, so that they were already pumped up about learning how to write “delicious” paragraphs.
First, my MT started by introducing the idea of a topic sentence; however, she didn’t just do by saying “Topic sentences are a part of a paragraph, and they help to introduce the main point of the paragraph”. She had the students suggest interesting topics that meant something to them – some of the examples my students thought of were things like their dogs, their favorite vacation, etc. She then had the students give example of intriguing topic sentences, and she would revise them on the board in front of the whole class, in order to model a good revising thought process (“Is this clear?”, “How could I arrange the words to make it sound better?”)
I love the hamburger graphic that you talk about having in your class. How have I not seen this yet? I will definitely have to come into your classroom and see it tomorrow! That's so cool, and that's definitely something the kids would relate to because let's face it, everyone loves food. My MT and I actually talked about today how we need more visuals and creative ways to help students with their writing. We haven't really paid attention to that because a lot of our focus is on math and science, but writing is in everything so it shouldn't be overlooked. Being that my MT taught Language Arts in 8th grade last year though, you can still tell that she has a passion for literacy when she teaches and we try to include as much reading and writing as we can in each lesson to keep building on those skills. For example, in Reading we have Reading Journals and we have had students work on their poetry skills by writing a poem about themselves. We also use the Reading Journals for students to write about a story that they just read and help to better their comprehension skills.
ReplyDeleteSomething I really agree with in the Writing Essentials book and you mention it as well is presenting meaning to the writing that we have students do. It talks about how if there is no purpose or meaning to the students, then they are not going to be able to fully understand how to use that skill of writing. Therefore, it is important for the students to see the whole picture and the reasons for learning different skills rather than isolating skills because when we isolate them, the students often times don't understand why.
I also agree with you and like the idea of having the "I can... I'm working on" list for the students for conferences because it presents the strengths and goals of the students and really shows how hard they have been working. I also like idea of having a "Quickshare." This is something that can happen fast if you don't have much time, but want to make sure the students see a memorable moment or are able to hear about something you found to be great or important. Like the book says, having a Quickshare can help the students see what some of the desired behaviors are and I think that is something that I'd really like to use. I'm very interested in seeing how our first set of conferences go and what my MT thinks are effective ways of conferencing.