Kirsta Paulus
1. “For me, it is essential that children are deeply involved in writing. Children need opportunities every single day to express themselves through writing in the forms and styles most meaningful to them. Children also need opportunities to share their writing with others, both teachers and other students, as both can help young writers develop their ideas further. I believe these are interconnected, as a sense of authenticity is gained when students write for their own purposes, and, correspondingly, their desire to share and revise their work is elevated when the writing is meaningful to them.”
2. My students have daily opportunities for writing, though as we don’t have writing workshop everyday, it is not always writing for the sake of writing. Oftentimes, students are required to write short sentences and answers to problems and questions posed to them in other subject matter, including science, social studies, and math. This allows us to “fit in” more writing time so that writing isn’t only during writing workshop time and students are able to see the meaning in mastering their writing skills and abilities (184).
During writing workshop, my mentor teacher very clearly relies on the Optimal Learning Model mentioned in Writing Essentials (221). She explicitly models how to think through and write about an idea, and then does a shared demonstration with the class. She often asks two or three students what they will likely write about, and they think through the action and some details together (through her questioning, “Oh, that sounds scary! What did you do next?”). This talking before writing is scaffolded conversation that helps the students form their thinking (183).
My mentor teacher also models writing behavior during these demonstrations, such as writing on every other line, dating the page, writing legibly, etc. (189).
We also write to perform acts of kindness, as mentioned in Writing Essentials on page 202. Students can write “bucket fillers” (from the book Have You Filled a Bucked Today?) to compliment one another during any free time they have throughout the day. We also write “You are a star because ___” letters to our star of the week each week.
- LL generally excels at writing, I believe due in part to her incredibly strong interest in reading books. She seems to thoroughly enjoy most writing workshop time, so long as the writing topic is completely her choice. She loves to write fiction, but really struggles with anything else. For instance, when administering the DWA the other day, she stared at her paper the majority of the 20 minutes designated for planning because she “didn’t have anything to write about” (as it was supposed to be about a “special friend,” and she assumed this had to be a true story and not something she could make up). Once we clarified for her that the story didn’t have to be true, she went to town. She wrote on the back of the pages in the assessment packet because she had too much to write just using the front. During editing/revising time, she made numerous marks on her paper to correct both spelling and punctuation, as well as to clarify and add detail.
I think what is causing LL to struggle when it comes to nonfiction writing but thrive at writing fiction is that she only reads fiction books. I believe that if she were exposed to some interesting nonfiction books, she may have an easier time when it came to writing true accounts, biographies, reports, etc. I think that allowing her more time to browse and explore nonfiction would make her more comfortable using these texts to support her nonfiction writing as well (196).
She may also be more interested in writing nonfiction if we used the strategy mentioned in Writing Essentials in which we teach how first, and then label it later (195). If we told her to write about otters (her favorite animal) based off of information she found in magazines and online, I think she would be interested in doing so. It wouldn’t be until after she was finished we could say, “See? You wrote an awesome nonfiction piece. Now the next time you are assigned to write a report, you know you can make it something very interesting.” However, if we told her to write a report about otters from the start, I think she would be disinterested.
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