Learning to Write

Learning to write is hard for me to remember. I remember the early years of learning how to form letters using workbooks and coloring assignments, and I remember learning how to write in cursive in the second grade. But the writing process is another story, I don’t ever remember learning how to put sentences together, what to include, and how to tie them together. In upper elementary school and middle school, I know we learned how to write essays and how to improve our paragraphs, but before that I do not remember specific instruction on how to write. I do not see much writing instruction while I am at my placement. Most of the time is spent focusing on reading comprehension and fluency or spelling. I would be interested to find out how students develop their writing schools, and what most programs are lacking (instruction wise) currently.

Language Arts Lesson Plan

I taught my language arts lesson plan on the book The Diggers. Originally I was planning on using the book Tar Beach, but after input from my C.T. decided on The Diggers. What was interesting about this book is that it begins as a story about things that dig; animals, people, and machines. But then develops into a story about a man and a goal he has. It was interesting to get input from the students about what they liked about the story as well as their predictions. After our discussion I had the students fill out sheets that asked them to tell one thing that happened in the beginning of the story, one thing that happened in the middle of the story, one thing that happened at the end of the story, as well as their favorite part of the story. It was hard to get the second graders to ask questions and have a strong discussion, but looking at their work really helped me see who understood and paid attention to the story. It was also a helpful assessment for seeing their writing skills. I was a little surprised to see that second graders were still having trouble making complete sentences. I saw many answers without capital letters or punctuation. All in all I think that the lesson was successful. The students had to remember the story, discuss what they thought, and recall information in order to write about the story.

Study Student and Literacy

I have been seeing unusual behavior from my study student lately. It seems that her reading fluency is getting worse as the year goes on. My C.T. has noticed this as well, and is not sure what exactly is causing it. The student might be held back this year so that she can improve her literacy skills. I do not know what the right choice would be, but as of now she loves school and is one of the students who actually does all of their work. I find her reading books for outside of class during free time, and taking an interest in reading and writing. So I wonder how is it that her reading skills seem to be getting worse? Have any of you had any experiences like this?

Language Arts Lesson

Renee and I had successfully completed our language arts lesson on The Snowy Day. It was a great experience for the students to relate their own experiences of snow day to the story of the book. During our lesson, I was surprised to know how well students could generate questions; especially, when it was their first time coming up with a question on their own based on the reading we did together, The Snowy Day. The CT was surprised as well in hearing all the great questions from the students. Moreover, the students who were listening to the question paid full attention and even raised their hands to answer their classmate’s question. These behaviors are favored and expected from students when the CT asks students with questions. Students forming questions suited very well to our lesson since we had prepared questions from the book to ask the students for enhancing comprehension of the text. The transition of having students ask questions after ours, it became somewhat easier for the students to come up on their own.

Students also worked on three-part story as an assessment after reading The Snowy Day as a class in which they did drawings and a little bit of writing about a story of activities they do during snow days similar to what Peter does in the book. Students were able to work on this assessment without a problem since it was a familiar activity they usually did in class with the CT. However, there were many stories of same drawings on all three pages or less details drawn to tell what the story of their snow day was about. Through assessments, I realized how students still needed to work on expanding their vocabularies for writing and including details for the drawings.

Overall, I felt good about how much the students have progressed since the beginning of the year.

Learning to Write

I can barely remember how I learned to write, but I do remember there were many tracing and reading. In elementary school (back in Korea), we had notebooks where letters were lightly written for students to trace over in practice of neat handwritings and directionality of each letters. In addition, there were journals to be written over the weekends with drawings explaining how I spent my weekend; and “neat handwriting” and “book report” competitions for each grade where everyone had to mandatorily participate. In order to win and be acknowledged, we had to read many books and practice creative writings outside of school to grab the readers’ attentions since I had to compete against 250 students in our grade. Competitions were a big deal for the parents and the school; hence it could not be ignored but practiced. Therefore, I don’t remember having an exciting moment of learning to read and write when I started learning to write.

When I began to learn English and was asked to write (end of 6th grade), it was the hardest experience in my school years. I had trouble reading in English in which led to challenges in writing. Grammatically, my sentences did not make sense and I could not get my thoughts expressed due to limited vocabularies. Gradually, writing skills developed and is still being developed due to engaging and fun activities introduced in American schools compared to my experiences in Korean elementary school. However, writing is still one of my biggest challenges.

Self Reflection Journal Entry

Over the course of the semester, our blogging group has touched on discipline of children quite a bit and been able to bounce ideas off of one another about how to implement that aspect into our classroom. In conjunction with that, we have spent a lot of time talking about how to generate a genuine, learning-filled discussion outside of the recitation-type that we know so well. In addition, we have spent ample time on how our experiences relate to how we teach and what that means for our future classrooms. It is an enlightening topic to address because we will be faced with a very real classroom next year, in which we have to come up with ideas and balance what we know in our heads with what is before us in the room.

The group does a really great job of challenging one another on certain aspects of the topics on which we’ve written; indeed, it is not uncommon for us to specifically identify a question or challenge for the other peers and give them something to really chew on. I am never disappointed in not being challenged with this group, and I take what my fellow teachers have to say to heart. I, too, try to make it a point to challenge deep thinking and further connections in the ideas being discussed because I really do care about expanding the knowledge of my peers.

Overall, I think that our group greatly benefited from the blog and would reward us with an A for all of our hard work and genuine comments that result in genuine learning.

Tompkins Chapter 2: Reading and Writing Processes

Reading and writing are genuinely related in which a development in reading can also lead to development in writing and vice versa. Hence, it is important for teachers to introduce appropriate processes for both reading and writing as mentioned in the chapter. Also a nice chart on page 66 demonstrates the comparison of the two and how similar they are within different stages. Reading and writing contains several stages of processes in which students can effectively comprehend texts and creatively write. Moreover, the stages have bullet points explaining what needs to be understood by the students to become fluent readers and writers.

The students in the kindergarten classrooms are always reading and writing. Books our CT reads to the class are not always new, there are more times when she reads a same book for several days and works around a book in doing activities. Having students do activities and assessments on a book, they experience more reading and writing related to a single topic in which develops their comprehension and creativity in coming up with more ideas for writing. In addition, the CT’s strategies of working around a book relates to some of the different stages that are listed on Tompkin’s chapter on pages 43 and 52 but in level of kindergarteners.