When they read silently my teacher has a worksheet that they have all week to fill out. Part of that worksheet contains a portion for them to write about a book they have read on their own. Right now the categories they have to write about include the setting, character, and theme of the book. These categories will change based on the different parts of a book they are learning about. Last week they had to summarize a book in their own words.
As I had discussed in my previous blog, the students had to think of three people that were important to them and come up with three activities they had done with that person. This activity relates back to page 67 of Book Club Plus when they talk about coming up with meaningful context for the students to write about. It is important because when it relates back to their own lives they can find a connection in their writing and put their own voice into their papers.
Most of our day deals with reading and writing, except for the hour they have to do math or if they have specials that day (kinetics, library, or integrated arts). I feel that a lot of the focus right now is on teacher-led talk because we are focusing on an author study (Allen Say) so we will read a book by him to the students once a week and then we will go back and discuss the commonalities and differences between the text and illustrations between all the books we read. The students will take those ideas and write a short paper about them. Even though a lot of the times the text talk is teacher-led, we are still giving the students plenty of time to have student-led talk to share ideas between each other while we also give them time to come up with their own ideas and then share them with the class. I think that by having all of this talking going on really helps the students find deeper meaning in the text especially when they hear the views of their classmates and even the ideas from myself and my CT.
As I have said in previous posts, we have not been doing as much writing as it sounds like is going on in your classroom and Sarah's classroom. I agree that improving their reading and writing skills is very important for their future so I dont understand why we are not focusing on it more. We do reading time in the mornings and silent reading most days but we have stopped doing reading workshop. This time seems more like time for us to just get DRAs done while the other students are quietly reading. I am beginning to get frustrated with this but I think that the main reson for this is that the MEAP test is coming up and we are gone to Woldumar nature center every day next week so maybe she is just trying to get all the necessities out of the way before that. . .
ReplyDeleteWhen my CT does read alouds, she does a great job of pointing out unfamiliar vocabulary and having students stop to think-pair-share with one another. We do alot of talking during this time about what is going on in the book and with making predictions. But, she never has had students write about it when they are done.
We have similar "journal" pages for students silent reading but they just list the title of the book that they read from their book box and one thing about it. I dont even know if they could write summaries and plot, setting, etc like your kids are. Do they write alot or are they just writing simple sentences? Every time we do writing for MEAP prep it becomes a big hassle and the kids all get so upset and frutrated.
We did that same activity from Book Club Plus where they had to think of 3 people and events that happened with them to write a story. This was the first day of writers workshop and then the second day they had to write sentences for each of their details but we have not gotten out our writing journals since then. I agree that this is a meaningful context for students to be writing about but I don't like how she just dropped off with it and never revisited to share stories, add more details, or edit.
We also focus on teacher led talk right now and I hear all about Allen Say and this author study (since we are all in Holt) but we are not doing that either yet! Right now we are spending so much time on getting ready to go to waldumar that I think we are "slacking" in these literacy areas. I am wondering how that will effect our schedule after we get back and after MEAP.
Aubrey and Kelli,
ReplyDeleteWe actually have spent a lot of time with the Allen Say author study in my third grade class. My MT reads at least one a week, and sometimes she will read two a week. This week we specifically read "Tea with Milk" (for the second time) and "Grandfather's Journey." The purpose for this was to have text-to-text connections because the families in both of these books are actually the same. The discussion that we had with the students was interesting. I believe that the goal of the discussion was for it to be more student talk than teacher talk, but unfortunately my class is not ready for this because of our lack of classroom community currently.
This week we also had the students writing after we did our read alouds. The students were given the sentence: "I made a text to self connection with (insert book title).... ." The students were very confident in writing these as well as discussing them. The students are used to having at least 10 minutes to write about their reading (either silent reading or read alouds) each day. If we do not have a text to text or text to self writing about the read aloud for the day then the students will have an "idea starter" for after their 20 minutes of silent reading time. These idea starters deal with the genre of their book, connections that they made with their book, a "cool" thing that they read that day, etc. One writing assignment that I thought that I really liked was the students had to write a letter to my MT and me about the main character in their book. I then read all of the letters and responded back with a connection that I had with it or a question that would get them thinking a little more. The students really enjoyed this.
Harvey and Goudvis mentioned "helping students choose text." My MT stresses this idea in our classroom. She did two lessons on how to choose a good book for each individual. We actually went over exactly what Harvey and Goudvis suggested by making a list of ways they can decide if it is a good book: reading the back, if the level is correct, because of the author, because of the genre, because of the length, because of the title, etc. The students also record what book they read (once they finish one) on a sheet of paper and they write if it was too easy, just right, or challenging.
We have also done the same writing assignment as both of you are working on. My students are actually writing their drafts this week and the final one is supposed to be "published" on Friday. However, I am a little disappointed in our conferencing and classroom management while the students are writing. Many of the students are not able to write out all of their ideas, and there has not been given a time for us to be able to conference with many of the students.
Kelli, I think one difference in our reading workshop/writing workshop is we are not talking AS much about Waldumar. This will be interesting to see the two classes together there next week because I feel as though we have had a little different preparation for this lesson week.