Jennifer Farrell

1) “For me, it is essential that students take ownership of, and have pride in their writing. I believe that without these two things writing could become a process that is neither enjoyable nor connected to the self, resulting in future writers without a passion or desire to write. When students are excited about their writing the concepts taught will be eagerly accepted, and students will strive to learn even more. I believe that with a passion for writing, which comes from pride and confidence writers will improve even outside the classroom.”

2) Writing is done all the time in my classroom, across pretty much every subject. We talk about writing when we read as a class. We talk about different writing strategies the author uses in the books we read. We strive to have the students apply these techniques (whether they are directly word related or not-pictures tell words, etc.) to their writing.

Students are watching the teacher writing very often whether she is making a list of rules/expectations or writing a quick story or writing a riddle. Students are also making observations/discovering things about writing as we read that turn into impromptu mini-lessons. An example of this is a student noticed that the word “know” has the letter k in the beginning but you don’t say the k sound. A quick mini-lesson was taught about the silent k.

Students write every day during writers workshop where they can go through old stories and add to them more words, more pictures and new techniques that we talk about before hand.

3) There is a student in my first grade class, O.T. who came up from kindergarten last year only for literacy instruction (I believe just reading, but most likely there was some writing involved in that instruction). Her writing (as well as her reading) is above level, but her motivation is minimal. She writes quickly and well but seems to not have much if any desire to become a better writer at this point. I think she might realize that she is above other children with her writing and therefore thinks that it’s okay for her to put something together quickly and then relax.

Even though this student is excelling for her grade I would say that she is on the verge of struggling motivation wise. I think by giving this student personalized instruction to show her what else she can do to improve even her writing would help her. My mentor teacher is starting an accelerated writing group with her in it, so hopefully that will help her to become more interested in writing and reading.