For me, it is essential that students are deeply involved and are invested in their writing. As a teacher it is my job to give my students the opportunity to have a real purpose, a real audience, and a real investment in their writing. While there will be struggles in writing, these three components will hopefully allow students to feel a sense of authorship. It is important that students begin with the end goal in mind and are thinking of quality first over quantity. I want my students to realize that writing is a form of personal expression and is an extremely personal activity.
In my classroom there is not a lot of writing happening presently. We are focused on MEAP prep, and since writing is not on the fifth grade MEAP we are not focusing on it. We have given the students an assessment on writing. Sadly, since this was an assessment my teacher did not give explicit instruction as to how to complete the writing because we want to have a starting level of their writing skills. The students have just started their first writing piece. Before the students were given the assignment my teacher demonstrated the writing (Writing Essentials, p. 180) to the students. She used the Elmo and showed the students how to use the graphic organizer to gather their thoughts for a specific purpose and audience (Writing Essentials, p. 176). The students are now drafting their stories of their “special place”, but the students do not seem to be invested in the writing. We have also done “MEAP writings”, which I would classify as short answer test responses. Sadly, these writing responses are verbally discussed and the students do not write them out.
The class’s first experience (assessment) with writing only focused on the quantity of the writing. This was the only extremely explicit instruction that she gave the students. In their first real writing assignment, my teacher focused both on quantity and quality. She heavily focused on the “lead” of the story, the student’s introduction paragraph.
I have not seen much writing in the classroom because we have not fully started the school curriculum yet. I have only seen writing in the form of a writing assessment, MEAP-prep, and the first writing assignment about the students’ “special place”.
Jay is a poor reader and is pulled from our classroom for two hours a day for extra help in ELA. Although I have not seen much writing, he definitely seems to struggle with writing. I think most of this stems from his difficulties with reading. He is a huge procrastinator in his writing. I think this could be because my teacher has not given any deadlines or timelines for the writing assignments, therefore Jay will then goof off until it is due. He told me he does not write well unless he is invested in the writing, therefore he recognizes the importance of understanding and getting interested in a topic (Writing Essentials, p. 178). Yet, he does not seem to know how to make himself invested in a writing.
Some strategies that I would use: I would have him write about cars. He said he wants to be a car designer when he grows up. I would have him read information about a topic (cars) then have him summarize it in his own words. This activity does not require him to “create” a whole writing by himself, but only rephrase. This would hopefully give him confidence in his writing abilities. I would also have him start to freewrite (Writing Essentials, p. 179). I would also have him start to do short writing assignments this would also help with his low reading ability when revising and editing. I would hope these strategies would give Jay the confidence in his writing and get him more comfortable in writing longer pieces.
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