Friday Reflections

If I haven’t mentioned that my school’s literacy coach, Courtney, is AWESOME – it’s high time to give her a shout out. She is really on top of her game – she makes us all better educators. Recently she shared with us that she is planning to create mentor text bins for teachers to use during reading and writing. Yes – to that, Courtney!   And yes to helping all of us learn how best to use the mentor texts.   So much in the “writing” literature supports using mentor texts to help all of us examine and study just what it is accomplished authors do to produce a solid piece of writing.    This link is a young teacher’s blog – brownbagteacher - Catherine Reed teaches in a small town in Kentucky – with a small class of students; this is only her 4 th year of teaching.   She shares so many great ideas on writing in this particular posting, but her entire blog is worth cruising as it’s literally chucked full of ideas on creating organizing material...

The work of Katie Wood Ray is helping me “unearth” some of the complexities surrounding writing; she is especially good about recognizing how authors use   structure   to construct meaning.    During a recent science teacher observation, I became more aware of how teaching students the structure of   procedural writing   in writing up a science experiment is more than learning the data from the science experiment – it is also a    student learning how to write up an experiment following   procedural writing   guidelines .   What is   procedural writing ?    A procedural text instructs the reader on how to complete a specific task.    So many of us already do this type of information writing with our students.    However, an important realization is the focus on teaching students that   procedural writing   is a structure many authors use to present information – and certain informati...

I can think of a few times in my life when I got involved in a project – and, more or less, got lost in the execution of the project. One such time was the building of jumbo size Jenga game – (Jenga being the game of starting out with a sturdy tower of wooden blocks and players take turns removing a wooden block – one at a time – with a steady hand until the whole stack crashes down). I found a blueprint on-line and used a miter saw to carefully saw and then sand two by fours to create a fairly large Jenga tower to play with my college buddies.  I remember the intensity and the satisfaction of the experience. Are there writing teachers out there who have created similar conditions like the conditions I am describing in my Jenga project – conditions that foster passion and stick-to-it-ness for their young “authors” to create a writing piece they are committed to and proud of – and want to share?  A former colleague, Caroline Colletti recently shared such resource below – it...