1.) For me, it is essential that students are confident in their writing and the writing process. I feel that if students have confidence in their writing, which could come from having confidence in the writing process, then they will see themselves as authors. Students need to write everyday so they are able to become comfortable with writing and it becomes habit for them. If they are writing everyday, they will become stronger writers through practice and from having mini lessons about writing taught to them on a consistent basis. Through being taught mini lessons about writing they can become confident in how they are writing and enjoy it. I also feel that students should be able write about what they want. If they are able to write everyday about something they want they will enjoy writing much more and feel better about their finished product.
2.) In my classroom, I have witnessed many opportunities throughout the day for students to write. First, the students have writing workshop everyday for an hour, which is talked about in chapter 8 of Writing Essentials, as being necessary for writing to be a daily commitment. During writers’ workshop, the students start out as a class where my mentor teacher will teach them a mini lesson about writing for about ten minutes. I notice my teacher demonstrating what is discussed in chapter seven of Writing Essentials, where she does not teach isolated skills, but instead will teach a mini lesson on the process of writing or how they should work during writers’ workshop. I notice that she is much more focused on the quality of their writing rather than the quantity. She has taught the students that, “When I’m done I’ve just begun”, which means when the student has finished a story, they should go back through and work to edit, add details, or pictures. After the mini lesson, she has the students write for about 40-50 minutes, then calls them together for sharing, which is also talked about in Writing Essentials as being very important. Other than writers’ workshop, the students will also write during social studies. I have seen them write about the topic that they talked about in social studies for the day. They do a similar process after some read alouds. The students will be given a sheet of paper and they will have to write about something pertaining to the book, such as their favorite part. Overall, my students engage in a lot of writing during the day, not just in writers’ workshop.
3.) There is one student in my class that struggles a lot when it comes to spelling during writing. This student has good ideas about what to write about and seems to enjoy writing, but has very low confidence when it comes to spelling. This student consistently asks how to spell words, which he expects for people to spell for him. My mentor teacher has taught the students what to do when you come to a word you do not know. The students should use their writing tools that are given to them to help with their spelling or stretch the word out, spell it as best as you can then move on. This student will still always ask how to spell words and needs someone to sit with him and stretch out every word. I have seen the student try to spell on his own and many times he is able to get the correct spelling or comes very close, but still gives up and asks for someone to spell it for him. Since he has this problem, it slows him down when he is writing and seems to frustrate him at times. As discussed in chapter 7 of Writing Essentials, I think a personal word wall would work well for this student. If he had a word wall that was on the inside of his writing folder of common words that he uses I think it would help him keep his flow of writing and not slow him down with always trying to get the correct spelling of words. Another strategy I would consider is having a one on one conference with him to try to teach him further about how to stretch out words. Although their was class lesson about this, I think it would benefit him to have more personal instruction on what to do when he comes to a word he does not know how to spell.
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