I honestly have not seen very much writing instruction in my classroom so far. Do you guys see writing in Language Arts, or is all the writing you see part of other subject areas? I cannot remember a single lesson on writing that I have seen. Whenever I am there for language arts time, the students are either doing book clubs, silent reading, or independent worktime on subjects other than language arts. I am disappointed that I have never seen them write an essay, or more than a paragraph at a time. I do not know whether it is because I only come in on Fridays, or whether that is just something students in a fifth grade Montessori classroom do not learn explicitly. I will ask my CT next week when they have writing instruction time.
I do see a lot of writing in the content areas though. Tompkins chapter 12 talks a lot about learning how to study, which is what I usually see while I am at placement. When the students are working on science, they always have study guides full of questions to answer. Page 412 of Tompkins talks about using study guides to direct students towards big ideas. I often see one student in particular struggling through the chapters. The study guides really seem to help him not to get overwhelmed with the huge amount of information that he is reading. Different than the book, the students do not go over the study guides in class. Instead, the teacher checks the study guide for completion and correctness. The students have similar study guides for social studies, although they do not have a book for that subject. Most of the readings are either online or included in the study guide.
I have also seen the students do reports for science, like the ones mentioned on page 398 of Tompkins. They each picked an element and made posters with pictures and commentary about the element. It was actually kind of cool because they got to make their element into a superhero, so they were talking about the element, but using the terminology that one might see in a Superman comic. I think this helped them enhance their writing genre knowledge and science knowledge at the same time. They had to include a heading and decide what information they wanted to display (and what information was important from their research). This is very similar to the Tompkins reading. I do not think they ever made drafts of their posters, as Tompkins suggests. Although that would have been time consuming, I think that would have been better for teaching them more about the writing process. It would have been more authentic for them to make drafts of at least the writing portion of the poster before making the actual thing.
Not a problem at all Jamie-I hardly look at it before Monday night anyway.
ReplyDeleteI think it’s really interesting that you don’t see writing in your class. I am in a second/third grade class and I see writing every time I am in my placement, but I don’t always see reading. I think that it should almost be the opposite for our classes, because my students aren’t superb are reading yet, and writing gets more and more intense and structured as students get older.
I see writing during LA/writing time more than I see writing in the content areas. For Social Studies and Science, students usually just have coloring pages or matching worksheets. For Math, students just have worksheets with traditional problems on it. I don’t see study guides at all-I think a big difference between what we see definitely has to do with the different grades we are in.
I feel like I help the most with spelling in my class. Students always ask me how to spell words. I make them sound it out and write down how they think it’s spelled, and then I see how they did. Students actually spell words correctly a lot of the time, and this way helps them gain confidence in their spelling and they aren’t just being told the answer all the time. I think it’s important for students to try to figure things out on their own first because they remember it better and they will be able to do it on their own again the next time, if they could do it the first time.
My class sounds similar to your's, Jamie.
ReplyDeleteAt first, looking at chapter 2 of Tompkins, I felt that what my CT does doesn’t relate very much to the approaches to writing in the reading. She focuses so much on reading during literacy time, that I feel like it is taking away from their writing. There are some assignments that she has them do where they brainstorm and gather ideas in their composition notebooks. However, that is really all they are used for. Then, with an assigned topic, they write on a piece of paper with an empty box on top for a picture and lines to write on beneath it. In contrast, Tompkins says that “students should choose their own topics for writing… so that they’ll be more engaged.” However, the book does note that this isn’t always possible. Also, I’ve never seen the students do the revising stage as Tompkins described. Many times my CT will revise, or students will be allowed to use a Spanish-English dictionary to replace their English words with Spanish, but the don’t do any sharing in writing groups or have revising centers.
Then, when I read Chapter 12, I realized that my CT does more than I realized with integrating writing across the content areas. Just recently they made posters (similar to that on pg 398, but using Microsoft Publisher), about a black person of their choice for Black History Month. They also just made a “No Tan…” book as a class. They had just read the English book called “Not So,” and they each contributed two pages to the book in the format of the English one they read. For example, someone wrote “Tall” and drew a picture of a tall tree, then the next page said “Not so tall” and there was a picture of a tree that was not so tall. I haven’t witnessed any of the other approaches in chapter 12 though. I really like the idea of learning logs and journals and I really think that the students could benefit from these. The book didn’t mention much about writing in math, but I think that this is really important, yet something my CT doesn’t stress. At the bottom of each math page there is a “Write about it” part, or “explain it.” Students are never required to do these.
I found the Gibbons reading really interesting because all of my students are second language learners. It focuses on “a genre approach to teaching writing.” I think this could really benefit my students who are learning to write in their second language! One thing I noticed that my CT does that the book talked about was explicit teaching about writing. As I mentioned in a previous post, she is very interested in explicit instruction lately. I think she always tries to model and give personal examples of how she expects the students to write.
I feel like because of scheduling, I was more involved in supporting my students’ writing development last semester. That is one reason I really wanted to incorporate a writing portion in my Language Arts lesson. I have encouraged students to continue on even when they don’t know a word in Spanish. Also, as my CT has asked me, I have supported them in reminding them that they can always get more paper. There are so many who write really big and after a sentence will say “I’m done.” I try to encourage them to think of more details and descriptions of what they are writing about. Finally, I have always pushed the students to write for their math assignments (which I mentioned above).