Showing posts with label writing workshop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing workshop. Show all posts

Friday, November 8, 2013

Recent Language Group Activities


 

This week the students in Natasha's language group have been exploring poetry.



We began with a journal entry.












The categories students were listing were items from nature, feelings, places and sounds.


The next day students circled the many words that they listed in their journal entries and chose one word from each category.  They used these words to write a poem.





Each student read their poem to the group.

We came up with a name for the five different styles of poetry that students used.
  • silly poems 
  • story poems
  • repeat poems
  • imaginary poems
  • "describing a moment in time" poems

The students then looked for examples of those styles of poetry in published poetry books and shared their discoveries with the group.
Reading Dear World by Takayo Noda

Finding an example of a story poem by Ralph Fletcher
Reading Dark Emperor by Joyce Sidman

This week Tom’s language group embarked on a two week Illustration Study. Students will study the techniques of a variety of illustrators. The goal is for students to incorporate some of the techniques into their written books as part of our writing workshop. The first book they explored was How to Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham, who is both the writer and illustrator. It is the story of a little boy who rescues a pigeon with a broken wing. On another day the students studied the book Hoptoad written by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt. A third book shared this week was The Sandman by Ralph Fletcher and illustrated by Richard Cowdrey. Each of the books incorporates a variety of illustration techniques. They generated a lot of discussion about perspective from close up, far away, from below and up high. It was amazing the amount of details that the students noticed in each of the books. Tom is looking forward to seeing what techniques each of students incorporates into their written books.




Joan's group has recently wrapped up their Illustration Study and has begun exploring pattern books. We are reading various types of pattern books and noticing the different patterns that the authors incorporate into the text. The children enjoy pointing out and describing the patterns that they notice to their classmates. Next week students will begin to experiment with patterns in the books they are writing.

Friday, October 25, 2013

The Role of Generated Spelling in Writing Workshop



In writing workshop we encourage students to generate spellings for words that they do not know how to spell. The beginning goal in writing workshop is for students to get their ideas onto paper, so that they can develop those ideas into cohesive pieces of writing. Young students who are concerned primarily with spelling words conventionally are often more conservative writers: “I love my mom. I love my dad. I love my dog.” They like to stick to words they are sure they know how to spell. Or they rely on others to help them spell, which undercuts their developing independence as a writer. Or they take so long to look for the spelling of a word, they forget what they were going to say next.

A willingness to use generated spelling frees the student to focus on getting those ideas into writing. We find that once a student makes this step, the writing becomes more varied, and the student works with more confidence. When we ask students to generate spellings, we ask them to stretch the words out and write down the letters that represent the sounds they hear. The goal is for them to represent the words phonetically. As their understandings of words develop, they can draw on what they learn about how words work, for example using two l’s in spelling wall because they have learned to spell “ball.”

An additional value is that the process of generating spelling is a type of encoding. There is research that shows that the process of working to encode words supports a child’s developing reading skills.


In other parts of our language group work, we do word study. In word study we work to add frequently used words to both the students’ reading and spelling vocabularies. Over time we also begin to explore common spelling patterns and word families. So encouraging generated spelling in writing workshop does not mean that spelling is not important. What is important is to explore it in areas that do not undercut the student's developing independence as a writer.