For me it is essential for students to feel passionate, to develop opinions, and to participate actively in the world around them. Not only is writing a way to reach out to others in this world they live in, it is also a way develop, consider, and record one’s own thoughts. From here the possibility of building mentally and emotionally from what can be seen on paper, what is already known, acknowledged and explored, to what they want to know more about. It is a way to track their thoughts, to be mindful of concepts introduced around them through text, and to reflect on how it personally relates not only to them but also the people that help make up their community in the world around them. For me it is essential to guide students through effective literacy strategies, to not only broaden their vocabulary, fluency, and composition that will be displayed in their writing, but to help them use these skills and this knowledge to grasp their big ideas, with a strong confident hand, and successfully convey these thoughts onto paper as best as they can. I want to inspire them to feel passionate and excited about expanding this foundation by putting these thoughtful emotions onto paper. I want to be able to motivate my students to participate in shaping the world by influencing readers around them, just like authors have influenced them. For me it is essential to plan accordingly with the end in mind, with many teaching strategies, and with modeling why developing this particular literacy skill goes hand in hand with reading, and is essential and important for their future.
I truthfully believe there has not been a lot of writing instruction in my classroom so far. We have been dealing with a lot of behavior issues and classroom difficulties, so we have only indulged in our writers note book twice, both times I felt students were not engaging deeply with their writing. A prompt was given and they were to write about the topic assigned. It was just to introduce them to the notebook. We also just finished the DWA tests; therefore they did just construct a storyboard to use as an outline for their story about an animal. This will help us see where they are in their writing, further allowing us to gage which writers need what type of guidance in their writing. Since they are second graders I understand why a topic was given, but I think to effectively see where they are this far, the topic should have been able to be selected by them. Like described in chapter 8 of Writing Essentials giving them the choice of their writing topic. I personally think this would allow them to write more easily about something they can deeply touch on, as best as they can for a beginning piece. Not all students have experiences with animals; therefore I noticed somewhere struggling to successfully and accurately show us where they are with their writing process. Lastly, I have not seen a lot of writing in all of their subjects; a lot of the work is strictly worksheets or read alouds.
We have a focus student that is struggling with writing instruction, or the little instruction experienced so far with writing. This is a problem in all subjects, as we have been trying to make more arrangements so this focus student, Rob, will be able to join the class consistently without disrupting his work or the class’s work. He gets very distracted, defiant, and dislikes sitting still and following directions. I have a feeling Rob will be a student we are constantly fighting to connect his interests with any subject matter to get him as engaged as possible. I think we will definitely have to mix up writing methods, but initially my first goal is to find a way to reach him. His interest, his respect, and understanding of why he is at school, what he should and shouldn’t be doing, and why. I plan to do this by modeling my writing, reading, behavior, and interest in school.
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