Week 3: Liz Adams

1. For me, it is essential to expose students to writing in every subject. Not only should their be time spent on writer’s workshop during the day, but I think it is equally important to take the opportunity to talk about writing in science and socials studies as well. It seems to me that when students are focused on writing only during writing time, they forget about it for the rest of the day and avoid it during other subjects. It is crucial to add writing to other lessons, such as writing a science report, or writing about historical facts, etc. I also think it is equally important to focus on conventions and grammar in writing, just as closely as style, voice and form. From my time in classrooms, I have noticed that the increasing prevalence of technology in the classroom and in the students’ lives in general has caused them to focus less on grammar and spelling. There should be more time spent on cleaning up the writing work with proper grammar and conventions, as grammar is something the students will even use in everyday conversations.

2. The students in my classroom are given a lot of opportunities to write and practice writing. Each day, we spent about forty-five minutes on writer’s workshop. The students just finished their DWA assignment which will give us an idea of where they are with their writing skills. We’re going to look at style, voice, form, and conventions. They also write a lot in the other subjects. The other day, they were observing terrariums they had made, and were writing down new observations and ideas. Yet, we get a lot of whining and complaining about writing. I hear, “do we have to write that much?” quite a bit. I think the writing is very quality writing they’re doing and during writing time, we try to have them write about things they might be interested in, or might have fun telling us about, such as the assignment they just completed about writing about their favorite place. During this assignment, they were able to write about any place, ranging from a city, to just simply their room. Our textbook, Writing Essentials by Regie Routman points out the importance of this idea. They tell us it is best to have “choice within structure” (Routman, 177) which means that the students are given some structure, such as a broad topic, and are able to decide where they are going to go with that topic. They also note that this means the students are given a “temporary scaffold... to write competently and confidently” (Routman, 177).

3. I chose to focus on one student who really struggles with their writing. This student is our lowest achieving writing student so far. The student’s writing lacks detail and every idea is very simple. One thing that is probably contributing to it is the lack of engagement. When we start writing, this student just simply looks around and is distracted very easily. The other day, I noticed that some of our students are at very high levels, while others are very, very low. I asked my teacher, “What went wrong, that one of these students is so very high while the other is so low?” I was wondering what happened in their education that makes them so different in their skill levels. She told me that she really thinks it is the parental involvement. She told me that this student has very little parental involvement, which causes him to lose interest and not take education/writing seriously. I was reading about strategies to help students like this in the textbook, Writing Essentials, and they strongly suggest showing the students examples, and say, “”Don’t expect high-quality writing from your kids unless you’re modeling what high-quality writing looks and sounds like” (Routman, 180). We definitely do this modeling in my classroom. Before each writing lesson, my teacher shows them an example that she has written, and reads it aloud to them. She then goes over what she did well, and what she could improve on. This is what the textbook calls, “Conducting scaffolded conversations before writing” (Routman, 181). We are providing this student with a lot of examples, so maybe what they need is just one-on-one conferences with us to explain what they are having trouble with.