Friday Reflections

A little reflection about what I have learned about writing this year. Looking back, I can see that my high school English teachers were slaves to the five paragraph essay. I don’t remember any of them explaining about how the five paragraph essay is a universal way to organize and develop ideas. I don’t recall any of them saying “Think about the person reading your writing” or “Help the reader out by paragraphing.”  I actually don’t think they ever brought up the idea of “the reader” – the person/s who needed to make sense of my writing.  I struggled learning the writing concepts of organization and development.  I also remember struggling with creating a good topic sentence – a sentence broad enough to encapsulate the ideas contained within a given paragraph.  And, when I was off to college and cranking out research papers – I struggled even more putting together a coherent paper.  I’m sure some of you can relate. You’re thinking - So what?  Well…what...

Here’s an idea -  Mother’s Day comes in this final month and all of us can conjure up how our students might write a message to probably the most important audience in their live – their Mom. I think most kids can hang their writing hats on the following idea. The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown could be used as a mentor text to show students how authors like Brown developed a message and to create a written Mother’s Day message for their own mothers.   Brown selects several mundane important things/events and builds the case for why each is important.  She opens giving a strong reason explaining why the thing/event is important. She continues building a case for its importance with several other reasons.  And she ends each description with the same sentence as the first.    Listen to the oral reading , and you will see and hear the effectiveness of the message that is set in a poetic rhythm. I have given you a verse using Margaret Wise Brown...

Over the course of this year, countless times I read this: to get better at writing, I must write – definitely a big overarching idea. I get it – and every time I sit down to write I hear a little voice saying comments like: “You can do it. Just get started”; “You have something to say – so say it, and then clean it up”;   “you won’t get better at writing if you don’t put in the work”. I am hopeful that over the years our students who participate in writing workshop won’t struggle with writing the way I do.  And, what does that mean for us?  We need to structure the writing experience in authentic, kid-friendly ways that will fire up kids to want to write.  We need to give them plenty of writing time. The other big reoccurring idea: use mentor texts to show kids what accomplished authors do to produce a good piece of writing.  Jennifer Jacobsen in No More “I’m Done!”  lays out a possible approach and values using what many of you do already – ...

The brother I talked about last week recently went to an art class. I was impressed with what he produced – he would be the first to say that he cannot draw.  He had a great art teacher who walked the class through every step - scaffolding.  A finished canvas stays on display throughout the sessions.  And Mark would readily admit “_______ no!  I can’t draw.” Mark’s experience reminded me of how mentor texts can be used to show our students how to study and imitate author techniques. Mentor texts can help writers take risks.  Ideally a mentor text should be a passage that students can relate to and maybe even read independently. Check out the oral reading of this mentor opinion book Red Is Best by Kathy Stinson . Let me share an entry I wrote about my favorite color – I used Stinson’s approach – and I don’t think it’s “stealing” her style.  By studying Stinson’s approach, I’m learning a fun little way to give enough reasons for my color choice.  ...

WILL READING OUR EMAILS ALOUD IMPROVE OUR WRITING? My older brother Mark reads my blog.  While Mark is not a teacher, his job requires a fair amount of high pressured written messaging. - especially in email form.  Recently he sent me an article by Sam Leith that has helped him with his writing. Mark suggested I might use ideas from the article as a blog entry.  Mark’s comments indicate that while he understands that Leith was talking about many important aspects of content in a written piece, Mark’s greatest walk away from the article was in response to Leith’s suggestion of reading aloud any important written Email message before pushing “Send”.  Pretty good advice for any of us… Mark read the article, the article spoke to him, and, because it spoke to him he heard its message. And, while Mark probably didn’t read Sam Leith’s article aloud, he does now follow the advice Leith gives – he almost always reads aloud any important Email message he needs to convey ...

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...