Try to reference the text when appropriate.
1. What important points seem to "pop-out" to you?
2. What patterns, categories or trends emerge between book 2 and book 3?
3. What in the text seems surprising or unexpected?
4. What in the text leaves you confused or excited?
Thanks again for your thoughtful reading.
Following up on comments from the first posting, I just want to say I really enjoyed reading everyone’s comments and being able to share/discuss ideas is great and so helpful! It gets me excited about the upcoming year.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the eee’s, we had a full classroom set last year and also struggled with how best to use them for writer’s workshop. In my opinion the writer’s notebook is so much more personal for this type of writing, especially for the prewriting phase.
Book 3- Essays
The thing that pops out at me in this book is how to push the writers thinking with conversational prompts (Session IV, page 49). While these prompts are all transitional phrases we might have used to hold ideas together, they really can push thinking to new levels and make the writer explore their initial ideas more fully. This whole process makes me think about writing differently and emphasizes the importance of the prewriting stage of writing.
For trends and patterns, my thoughts keep coming back to Lucy’s emphasis on importance of the prewriting phase and just how many lessons are spent in this phase. It isn’t until session VII that the writer makes a plan for writing, and even then there is still more work done exploring what to “really” write about. Coming from my background this is a different way to approach a “goal” and makes me think about it in a different way. The process is not as linear as I would approach it on my own. I would very likely quickly decide my topic and plunge in with a plan and get to drafting as quickly as possible without pushing myself to think more. I think this is a trend/pattern because it is also how she approached narratives, spending a lot of time generating ideas and making lists of possible stories to write to find one that rings true or hold special importance.
I can see how this strategy really raises the level of the writing by making it more meaningful and thoughtful, and I will have to watch my natural tendency to “get to it” to allow for the students’ great ideas to bubble up to the surface.
One confusion for me, and I think for students is with all of the prewriting work they do during this unit they feel they are already drafting their essays when really they are prewriting ideas. There is some reluctance to then do the necessary organizational work of the drafting phase.
I am really excited about the whole unit since it is a chance for the students to come up with some really important and significant ideas to write about. The level of thought resulting from this unit is astounding and the students will surprise themselves and get excited as well.
Some things I would like to share – One strategy we used was spending many days just defining what essays are by having the students immerse themselves in many different essays and brainstorming what qualities they notice. From this, they then picked mentor texts to use throughout the unit to refer to when they got stuck.
ReplyDeleteThere is a great resource on the web for essay mentor texts and that is NPR’s- This I Believe series.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4538138
There are hundreds of essays to choose from, many written by teenagers and appropriate to share with 5th grade. You can print them out to share and then also play the authors recorded voice reading the essay. This is so powerful and inspirational to the students. There is also a book of kid’s essays called, Kids Write Through It: Essays from Kids Who've Triumphed Over Trouble. This book is another great resource.
I read this book last year and taught the entire unit, we did most of the lessons but combined some lessons that the 4th grade had been doing previously to teach persuasive essays.
ReplyDeleteWhat popped out at me originally was the lesson where we created the t-chart with "things we notice" and "what we think abou them". This was a really productive way to teach the kids how to choose a position and to pick something that they care about for their essays.
The pattern that I noticed throughout the book is that Lucy's basic premise is that the kids always generate their own topics, even with expository writing. A lot of the idea generating etc.. is very similar to narrative pre-writing.
On this second read not much was surprising or unexpected, confusing or exciting, but on the first read, I found the book to be a bit murkier than the first one and I felt like it didn't wow me near as much. For both the first book on narratives and this one I created a very basic, scaled down step by step approach to the process for my team and I had a MUCH harder time with this book then the other one. Also, the entire team agreed that we didn't find this book as useful as the narrative book and we still found ourselves supplementing the lessons with strategies from other places.
In both books, following the lessons in order, I got to a place where I though, "Okay, we just need to move on and get to the editing phase." I think that may be because it's for 3rd through 5th graders and the 4th graders at Wilder are on the high end of that from the get-go.
Our students ended up writing about 4-5 persuasive essays during this unit and choosing one to publish. Their topics varied from things like, "Why my mom should buy me a cell phone." to deeper topics like poverty or animal abuse.
Mary- "This I believe" is a tremendous resource for this unit and why didn't I think of this last year? I certainly won't forget it this year!
1. What important points seem to "pop-out" to you?
ReplyDeleteThis book was very hard for me to get through. I did like the parts of the T/Column (pg. 19) and the Thesis mini lessons ( pg. 76). Also, the importance of framing the main idea. I feel like the prewriting is too long and students will struggle with writing a strong persuasive or expository essay. I would use many other resources when teaching essays.
2. What patterns, categories or trends emerge between book 2 and book 3?
The trends that I see between book 2 and 3 is the prewriting and generating topics, as Mary and Deanna have already stated. I feel like you can really see the spiral between the books. As a 5th grade teacher, most of students will be familiar with all of these ideas, strategies, etc. especially as the years go on.
3. What in the text seems surprising or unexpected?
The text surprised me by how long it takes to get to the main idea of an essay. In addition, I am surprised how the students will generate the ideas. When it comes to an expository or persuasive essay we have worked on how to make a strong persuasive essay and we do this by focusing on prompts and then having the students come up with ideas, thesis, etc. I also was surprised how students do not use any outside resources ( pg. 128) until after the revising.
4. What in the text leaves you confused or excited?
I am once again, excited to use this book for the upcoming school year, but I will have to add some additional resources for essay writing.
Thank Deanna and Mary for the comments.
Thank you for all of your thoughful responses. NPR is always a great resource and I think we do need to remember to immerse the writers in the type of writing that we expect them to write. I will begin collecting so we can just through a big pile out and let them dive into the style of reading.
ReplyDeleteDevon wrote up a schedule that I asked her to post that she wants to use for writing next year. We are picking one day next week to sit together and talk in person on how we want to approach the year. I would love it if we could all meet. Let me know a day that works for each of you and if it does not work for you at all--don't worry about it.
Sorry I never responded on the day to meet. I was out of town for most of last week, but I'm looking forward to seeing you all back at school tomorrow!
ReplyDelete