Week 3- Jenna Banish

1. For me, it is essential that children view writing to be fun. Using your imagination and translating your thoughts on to paper is a very important skill to acquire for all aspects of literacy. It is important for students to explore different topics and genres that interest them so that they can personally connect to and enjoy what they are writing. I believe that each child should take pride in their writing as well as their classmates. I believe that children should be presented with daily opportunities to write so that they can become better.

2. My mentor teacher owns and follows and lot of the teaching practices of Writing Essentials. As chapter 8 outlines, it is important to find daily time for writing. In my first grade classroom, students are given daily opportunities to write in writing workshop. At this point in time, we always start off with a mini-lesson, outlining procedures, expectations and talking about writing. We have talked about how writers need to build stamina; we have a chart that we fill out every day on how many minutes they wrote for (we are already at 24 minutes)! There is a strong focus on worthwhile topics, quality writing and illustrations. We have constructed several charts on what quality writers write about and what quality illustrations look like so that the students can look at them if they ever need reminding. We talk about pre-writing techniques how to tell your story on your fingers first (first finger is the title, second is the first page etc.) After they have had time to work on their story books we come together as a whole group and students have the opportunity to share what they tried as a writer or an illustrator that day with their peers; the students really get excited and show a lot of pride in what they’ve done! Each student has a daily writing folder where they keep their storybooks. The folder also contains an alphabet sound chart and pictures of things that they like which might help them to come up with ideas on what to write if they ever become stuck.

3. I am going to consider my student B.S. This particular student is struggling with choosing worthwhile topics and engaging herself in that topic. She will have a good idea on something that she wants to write about but she has a hard time getting it on paper and will essentially write the same thing on each page. For example, she was writing a story about the beach and the only information that the reader got out of the entire story was that she went with her mom, sister, and friend. A good strategy that I could use with her is to pre-write or think out loud. Brainstorming this way may give her more ideas on what she wants the reader to know. What did you do at the beach? What was your favorite part of the day? What is her intention for writing about this story? (Writing Essentials 178).