Unsent Memo

TO: Ms. Angle

FROM: Lauren Nouguier

DATE: February 17, 2012

SUBJECT: 1st Grade Vocabulary Lesson Observation- The Paper Bag Princess

Thank you for welcoming me to observe your 1st grade literacy lesson this week. It was obvious that your students were very engaged in the read aloud. Reading aloud to students is an excellent way to expose students to new vocabulary.

There were several aspects of you lesson that stood out to me. First, before you read the book aloud, you introduced students to schema in a very direct way. Now students know they have a schema that they can access when they learn about new concepts. With more practice, students will be able to transfer that skill to their own reading. You also did an excellent job of modeling how to access schema. Students were very engaged while sharing their schema about princesses with you as you recorded their background knowledge on an anchor chart.

I also noticed that, as you read, you addressed new or difficult words. Two specific occasions included the words “magnificent” and “fantastic.” When you came across the word “magnificent,” you helped students define it in context. When you read the word “fantastic,” you used their new schema of the word “magnificent” to define it. Learning new vocabulary in a meaningful context like this is so important for students.

Finally, once you finished reading the book, you revisited the students’ schema about princesses. This seemed to be a very useful exercise. Through this, students were able to recognize that schema can change as they learn new information. By recording their new learning about princesses, you modeled that that students have the ability add to and change their background knowledge.

Thank you again for having me in your classroom!

Parents: Share Your Reading and Writing with Your Children!

This piece is meant to be an article in a school newsletter. It brings to light that children benefit greatly from parents sharing their personal reading and writing with their children. I also share some ideas that parents can try at home to engage children in reading and writing:

Your child’s first experiences with literacy happen long before they start school (Morrow, 2009). Young children mimic their parents’ reading and writing practices by pretending to read books, or newspapers, or by writing letters or making grocery lists. They begin exploring the world of reading and writing based on the reading and writing they see you do. As students grow older and start to receive more formal reading and writing instruction at school, they continue to benefit from observing the reading and writing habits of their parents. Both parents and teachers can incorporate personal reading and writing experiences into literacy lessons for children. If we, as teachers and parents are aware and reflective of our own reading and writing habits and attitudes, we can encourage our students to seek out that same reflectiveness. Here are a few ways you can use your literacy experiences to help encourage your child’s learning:
 

• Schedule times throughout the week when the family can sit down and write about anything- journals, stories, or other ideas that interest the writer. Then, designate a time for writers to share something that they’ve written.
• Compose stories, letters, or articles together as a family (Fletcher, 2001).
• Reflect on your own writing with your child. Point out things that you thought were good, as well as areas within the writing that could be improved. Encourage them to do the same with their writing.
• Read and discuss books together. Write letters to the characters or to the author. Brainstorm and write alternative endings for stories that you have read.

Regardless of the kind of writing and reading you choose to share with your child, remember to take time to reflect. Think about what was read or written, but also reflect on your own habits and attitudes toward reading and writing. Encouraging your child to be reflective empowers children to become better readers and writers (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001).

Hypothetical Letter to an Administrator

I interviewed some teachers at my school about our literacy program, then wrote a hypothetical letter to the principal. I'd like to present it to one of my administrators, but I'm wondering if it's too critical. Your thoughts?


February 3, 2012



Dear Administrator,

I am writing to voice a concern I have about the K-5 literacy program at our school. In the six months that I have taught at High Point Academy, I have observed a disconnect between reading and writing instruction that I am afraid may not be benefiting our students. Although classrooms across our elementary school have a set amount of time for reading each day, there is very little writing that is incorporated into the reading program. Further, very little writing instruction is set aside each week. With a few changes in teaching practices, and some changes in the school-wide schedule, students can benefit from complete reading and writing instruction, which is synergetic in nature (Nagin, 2006).

I propose that teachers be provided with continued professional development in the areas of reading and writing. This professional development could focus on the complementary nature of reading and writing. For example, both reading and writing encourage phonemic awareness and phonics skills in students. Further, teachers can help students make connections between what they write and what they read. Literature, from picture books to newspapers, to novels, can be read in class and viewed as writing that students can model after. As these synergies between reading and writing become more evident in the classroom, we will also see growth in students’ ability and eagerness to read and write.

Finally, the Leadership Team at High Point Academy should consider making some changes to the school day schedule in kindergarten through 5th grade. Currently, all classrooms in the elementary school participate in a one-hour long reading block in the morning every day. However, not every classroom has set the same standard for writing. Throughout these classrooms, there is very little consistency regarding when and how writing is taught. If a writing block could be scheduled into the school day, teachers would be able to teach writing skills with more consistency (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001). Also, students would start to feel that writing was a more routine part of their day, much like their reading block.

Thank you for hearing what I have to say. If you are interested in discussing any of these suggestions, please let me know. I would love to bring these concerns and solutions to the Leadership Team at this month’s meeting. 

Sincerely,



Lauren Haug
Learning Support Team
High Point Academy  

Reference List



Fountas, I. C. & Pinnell, G. S. (2001). Guiding readers and writers: Teaching comprehension, genre, and content literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.



Nagin, C. (2006). Because writing matters: Improving student writing in our schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

My Reading and Writing Process

The abilities to read and write do not naturally develop in students. Both are the product of learning separate but similar processes. Reading processes help students sustain reading by solving words, monitoring and correcting, gathering information, predicting, maintaining fluency, adjusting to different types of texts. Other processes in reading help students to expand upon the meaning of text. These processes include predicting, making connections and inferences, synthesizing, analyzing, and critiquing (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001). These processes help readers understand and apply concepts that they have read. For writing, processes flow back and forth between prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing work (Fletcher & Portalupi, 2001).

Processes in both reading and writing require students to solve words, maintain fluency, make adjustments and corrections, analyze, critique, and synthesize. While students benefit from being introduced to each of these processes, it is important for educators to remember that each individual will approach reading and writing processes in different ways. Students will excel in some parts of each process, but struggle with others. As an educator, it is important for me to identify how I approach reading and writing processes, along with my struggles and how to address them.

As a reader, I find that I experience different reading processes depending on what I’m reading. For most types of reading, I experience a majority of the processes used to sustain reading. These processes, including solving words, gathering, and maintaining fluency, help me to comprehend what I read. Of the processes used to sustain reading, I find monitoring and correcting the most frustrating. As a newly married individual who teaches full time, and attends grad school, I easily lose track of monitoring my reading as my mind fatigues or wanders to other responsibilities that may require my attention. Often, I will find myself dozing off in a book, or reading page after page, only to realize I remember nothing of what I read. One can imagine that this is frustrating. As I continue to acknowledge this area of frustration, I also look for ways to address it. One thing I try to do when I lose track of my reading, is take a break. Forcing myself to continue reading will not benefit me. Taking a mental and physical break, and returning to re-read the parts I lost track of can help me to better understand what I was too tired or distracted to initially understand.

I notice that I use varying processes to expand meaning of text depending on what my purpose for reading is. For example, I will go through the process of summarizing something I have read if my purpose in reading is to share new information with someone. If I read an educational publication or research about teaching strategies, I will often summarize what I have read to share with my colleagues. The process of analyzing and synthesizing also proves useful when reading educational publications. After reading, I will analyze how a particular article’s suggestions will work in my classroom. I synthesize information when I try to apply what I have read to my classroom. When I read non-education related text, such as cooking magazines, or how-to columns for arts and crafts, I can take what I have read and try to re-create it. These are just a few ways reading processes play out in my day-to-day life.

Similar to my reading processes, I find that my writing process changes depending on what I am writing. When I write for personal purposes, such as in a journal, I may pre-write, or I may just draft. Depending on my mood, my journal entries can consist of stream of consciousness writing, which has no topical focus, to an entry focused on a specific thought or idea that has been floating around in my mind. However, when I write a more formal piece, such as an individualized education plan, work that will be presented to colleagues, or work for graduate school, I pursue a more formal process. In my more formal writing process, I almost always pre-write by brainstorming, researching, and creating a sketch, or outline or my finished piece. Next I write a draft. As I draft, though, I move back and forth to pre-writing, finding new research when I need more information, or jotting down ideas in my outline as they come to me. For me, drafting also involves revising. Every so often, as I draft, I stop, re-read what I’ve written, add, change, and omit, and then continue drafting. Over time, I have been able to comfortably transition between these three parts of my writing process. After I am through with these first three steps, I usually ask my husband to proofread it for me. Once he has done that, I publish it, usually by sharing it with classmates or colleagues, posting it to a blog, or turning it in as an assignment.

Proofreading is the most difficult part of the process for me. One reason for this is that I tend to be in a hurry to just publish a piece, and I feel inconvenienced by the fact that I have to go back and re-read my entire work before I publish it. My coping strategy for this has been to ask my husband to read through to look for mechanical and grammatical errors. However, I am beginning to realize the necessity of proofing my own work in addition to having someone else proof it. Regardless of how skilled my husband is at proofreading my work, he can never approach editing my paper with the full knowledge of my intentions for writing it. Also, taking the time to re-read my own pieces helps me become more familiar with my own writing.

After analyzing my reading and writing processes, I can see that I am living proof that these processes are not linear or restricting. Reading processes do not all apply to all situations for all readers, just as writing processes are not applied the same in all writing situations for all writers. Understanding my reading and writing processes can help me emphasize the reality of individual reading and writing processes to my students. Acknowledging my struggles with these processes can help me empathize with the struggles my students face in developing their own processes.


Reference List

Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Fountas, I. C. & Pinnell, G. S. (2001). Guiding readers and writers: Teaching comprehension, genre, and content literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Authentic Writing- Persuasive Essay

Writing is a classroom activity that can often cause students to be apprehensive. It involves several components such as ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions (Fisher & Frey, 2003). Balancing all of these components at once can be daunting for a student. As an educator, teaching these writing elements in a formulaic way can cause confusion for students, sometimes discouraging students from wanting to write. However, if teachers provide authentic writing experiences, they will see their students attempting a number of relevant writing experiences outside of required classroom based writing. Allowing authentic writing also gives students the opportunity to express their creativity through writing. Finally, students who are provided with authentic writing opportunities learn to become better writers.

Often, when students are asked to approach writing in a formulaic way, they are usually asked to write about things they experience within the classroom. For example, students are often asked to write about a book they read in class, or a science or social studies lesson. Since classrooms consist of a variety of individuals, it is wrong of teachers to assume that every student will take away the same message from the same lesson. When teachers formulaically narrow writing down to a few aspects of a topic that was taught, they limit the students ability to show their real learning of that given topic. In other words, “teachers decide what is taught, students decide what is learned” (Fletcher & Portalupi, 2001). With authentic writing, students have the opportunity to show what they understood and found important in content lessons. Collecting authentically written pieces from students can also help teachers get an idea of how well classroom lessons were learned. Using authentic writing in this way benefits both the teacher and the pupil.

Authentic writing experiences also help foster creativity within students. While formulaic writing causes young writer to conform, authentic experiences allow students to explore their interests and exercise their creative ability (Angelillo, 2006). When students write about things that spark their own imagination, they begin to build confidence in their own unique writing style, and begin to develop their own voice. Teachers can encourage this creativity by providing motivation and materials that spark the creative flame within their students. Through authentic writing, students can be introduced to new topics and new literature that they otherwise would have missed in a more formulaic model. Authentic experiences can create an interest in writing, and also allow students to take ownership of the things they write.

Finally, when students are given authentic writing experiences, they learn to become better writers. Sometimes, an authentic writing approach is identified as an approach with minimal instruction. However, both authentic and formulaic writing approaches come with an instruction component. In both approaches, students learn about writing processes, different types of writing, and editing skills. Authentic writing, however, allows for teachers to reinforce these skills based on student needs (Fletcher & Portalupi, 2001). In authentic writing, students are given a small amount of whole-class instruction each day, and during writing time, students engage in conferences that can reinforce skills that they learned throughout writing class. During these conferences, individual writers meet with a teacher or a peer to review their writing, and discuss ways to revise it. Teachers can use these authentic experiences to provide individualized writing instruction to a student based on her needs.

When teaching writing, teachers should strive to provide as many authentic writing opportunities to their students as possible. Authentic writing opportunities allow students to explore their school-based learning, display their creativity, and learn to become better overall writers. By allowing authentic writing experiences rather that formulaic ones, students will be more engaged in writing, minimizing apprehension, and fostering a healthy classroom environment for young writers.


Reference List

Angelillo, J. (2006). Prompt writing vs. workshop writing. In Writing to the prompt. Retrieved from http://www.davidson.k12.nc.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?sectiondetailid=28230

Fletcher, R. & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing workshop: The essential guide. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2003). Scaffolded writing instruction: Teaching with a gradual-release framework. New York, NY: Scholastic.

How I Became a Writer

From very early on, I was always considered a good student. I learned to read quickly, I was responsible, I got good grades, but I must say, writing is a skill that I had great difficulty developing as a student. Reflecting on elementary school, junior high, and high school, I cannot recall a time when a teacher provided me with writing instruction, or even made writing sound fun. I know that I could write. I was an excellent speller, and a master at identifying parts of speech (sentence diagrams were my favorite). Those were really the only two components of writing I really remember enjoying. However, there are a few writing assignments throughout my school that jump out at me.

My earliest writing memory comes from my 3rd or 4th grade classroom (I can’t remember which, because I had the same teacher both grades). We were learning about mammals in science, and every student in the class got to pick one of their favorite mammals to write about. This was to be an expository piece informing our classmates about our favorite mammal. Mine was the leopard, because I liked the way it was spelled. This was probably the easiest writing assignment I ever received. Provide information about something. Where does one find information? The encyclopedia of course. What easier than to grab the “L” encyclopedia, and write down everything about leopards.

Perhaps now would be a good time to mention that this was also my first lesson on plagiarism. Shortly after I handed my paper in, I was held back from recess to learn about the legal repercussions of my actions. In doing this, the teacher accomplished her goal of keeping me from plagiarizing, but simultaneously discouraged me from wanting to continue writing. No real action was taken to help me correct what I had done.

After an experience like this, it comes as no surprise to me that I cannot recollect another writing experience until my sophomore year of high school. My English teacher approached us with an assignment that was sure to be engaging to most of the students in my class. We were to choose a celebrity to write about including childhood, career, successes, failures, and so on. It seems that this category appealed to quite a few of my classmates, but what about the handful of us that weren’t interested in celebrities? Was there another category of person we could have chosen so that we could learn about how biographies are written? If only I had known to ask that question back then. Instead, I ended up disinterested, and with a mediocre report.

Sadly, it wasn’t until my college years that writing finally clicked with me. After falling on my face with a few writing assignments (which I definitely wasn’t used to), I sought out the support of professors and peers to help me out.

I have some speculations about why I may have had difficulty learning to write through my K-12 schooling. As an adult, I can recognize that my personality plays a role in my learning style. I was a student who was intimidated by thinking out of the box, and challenged by assignments that seemed to have no formula or process. To my memory, none of my teachers helped fit writing lessons into my learning style. I was told, “Write about this,” and then reprimanded when it wasn’t correct.

Now, as a teacher, I can reflect on my writing experiences to help guide as I try to teach students how to write. Because of the experiences I had, I am sensitive to students when they are frustrated with writing. It is important to acknowledge when a student communicates frustration, and to work with them to help alleviate that frustration. Also, teachers need to engage students when it comes to writing. Allowing students to choose what they write about often can help students understand the processes of writing at a more meaningful level.