Ch. 10 and Graves Article

Graves Article 

First I am going to start with Graves article Children Can Write Authentically If We Help Them.  This article really helped me to see how wonderful journal writing can be if we really promote it and go about helping our students get started.  I was amazed by the stories Graves gave of journal articles that he has encountered that were written with the help of an enthusiastic and thought provoking teacher.  It really touched my heart to hear how the first two boys wrote about their hunger for “want”.  B.J. wanting to know why he had to choose where he wanted to live, and Sean wanting to know why his dad wouldn’t talk about Vietnam but how if he ever wanted to he would be there to listen.  I knew that writing could be beneficial to children, but I guess I never understood to what extent until now.  I think that if I had written in a journal when my father was sick with cancer and after he died it might have helped me to really get out my emotions and to understand or be able to think through better why this had happened. 

I believe that if a teacher can learn to model for their children the process of thinking out loud and on paper and asking those questions as they write, the students will really start to grasp how to take problems, questions, and ideas, and start to put it on paper even if at the beginning it is a very slow process, it will really help the students to start enjoying journaling.  I thought that this article was very well written and really shows teachers that writing can be done in a different way other than just giving prompts, or topics.  The article shows that students need to learn to write just to write, and to have fun with it!!!

Ch. 10

At the beginning of chapter 10 it talks about motivation and lack thereof.  I agree with what the author is saying about how students might have a negative view of writing (it may be boring, they feel it not related to their life, etc.) and so the student turns their views towards writing as negative.  I also believe that whether a student feels confident in writing affects whether they are willing write.  I know that I was never really praised in highschool about my writing so I always felt negative towards what I had written and I always tried to steer clear of it at all costs.  Since high school I feel that my self confidence has greatly increased due to professors in college that have helped me to understand that I am not as bad as I thought.  I think that your experiences with writing greatly affect how you feel toward writing.

I really like the idea of the literate communities.  I hope that I have a classroom where my students work together with sharing ideas for writing.  I also hope that they feel as though they can read their work and feel comfortable with what they have written.  I think that these communities would really help students learn to use their emotions and ideas to write about.  I think other students might draw inspiration from hearing the other students read them out loud or the student reading someone else’s work to themselves.

I try to use different text types in my classroom.  I allow students to write in a writing center.  They are also allowed to write around the room, words they see on the wall.  Sometimes we write together thinking out loud and coming up with sentences.  After reading the part about how to use different types of text in the classroom I would really like to have them doing more writing in groups maybe with a science experiment we do, a post office like you suggested and they can write letters to their friends and give them out.  We also have a smart board in my room so I am going to try to come up with some good ways to use that in my writing.  If you have any suggestions please let me know.  I am utilizing it for math, calendar time, social studies, but writing is one thing I have still not come up with much stuff for. 

I thought this chapter really helps to explain first why some students steer clear of writing while others enjoy it.  I also thought that it gave great examples of things to use in the classroom and different ways of going about these ways and how they will benefit the most important people in our room, our students.  Very good reading selection!!! I really enjoyed it.

Ch. 1 Best Practices in Writing Instruction

This chapter was very interesting to me and a very good start to this book.  Writing has been a struggle for me to teach these first two years of teaching.  In this book it talks about how teachers aren’t necessarily formally trained on how to teach writing.  This is what I have run into.  I have ideas for writing activities and making books and things like that but for me the hardest part is deciding where to start with your students. 

In this chapter it talks about how in a first grade classroom if the students are engaged they should be able to be writing paragraphs.  I do not think that my students last year were developmentally ready to be writing paragraphs.  I had a few students that by the end of the year could write me a page on the big lined paper, but none that would be able to write multiple paragraphs.  I found it very challenging to get the other students that weren’t writing this much to get a few sentences down on paper.  It was like pulling teeth to get them to write.  Maybe I was not engaging them enough.  I am not sure exactly. 

My favorite part of this chapter was when the writer was talking about how teachers need to be formally trained on teaching writing and how there needs to be a school wide writing system.  I am all for this.  I think that at my school if we could sit down and come up with a school wide writing system we might start to see some of the positive improvements that the Michigan school system started to see.  If teachers were trained and had many sessions where they could get with other teachers and share ideas and lessons they have done I think it would really help.  I know for me I really benefit from hearing other teachers talk about what they do with writing in their classroom.  It gives me ideas for my class, but also helps me to see other ways that I could be engaging my students. 

The curriculum in my county for kindergarten writing just blows my mind.  It really drives me crazy that they expect all kindergartners to be able to write a full sentence by the end of the year.  I know that there are some students that are developmentally ready but they are not all ready.  It is stressful for me as a teacher because I am teaching and working really hard on writing but we have not yet introduced all the letters to our students and when they don’t know all the letter sounds they can’t sound out words to write.  I really struggle with teaching writing in Kindergarten and I hope this book and this class will help to give me some ideas of some engaging activities that I can use to help my students learn to write.

One of the really interesting ideas that I read in this chapter that I really would like to implement in my classroom was the way that the teachers were rewarding improvement in their writing.  They were not rewarding just for doing writing but they were rewarding the students because they were making improvements.  I think that this is a great idea.  I know that I catch myself really praising my students just for doing any writing, and I know that I am in kindergarten but I am really going to try to make an effort to praise and reward students when they make strides with their writing even if it is for small things like putting spaces between their words or making sure they have capitalized the beginning letter of the sentence and put a period at the end. 

I am really looking forward to reading more in this book.  I think it is going to really give some good insight into ways to make teaching writing more effective.

Amelia’s 5th-Grade Notebook

Wow!!!  This book was so interesting.  I think that the notebook really represented the way a 5th grade girl would write in a journal.  Amelia expressed her emotions and her true self in this book.  She was not afraid to write about how she felt or what things bothered her about her friends, school, the season, her life.  The author really did a wonderful job taking the role of Amelia and leading her to talk about things that girls in the 5th grade might really experience.  Reading this journal made me remember so many things about school that at the time seemed so important but looking back really were just a stepping stone to the person I have become today.  Amelia really draws the reader in.  I love all the drawing.  I truly believe that that is how a 5th grader probably sees the world.  Amelia really uses great writing in this journal too.  I love the day “Dressed for Disaster”.  It really made me laugh.  The way that she views herself and the way she compares herself to a frog really helps to show how much girls her age are affected by how they look or how they perceive themselves.  I think that real 5th graders struggle with the way they look.  Girls that age worry so much about how they look.  I think that Amelia really would be a great book for students to read.  It would help them to see that if they write in a journal then maybe they can get some of their thoughts out and even keep track of what goes on throughout the year.  I also think that by students writing in a journal like this they get great practice at writing.  They can brainstorm, just write for fun and really get to try out different methods of writing.  I think that journaling really is a great thing for teachers to use in the classroom.

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