When reading the text from Book Club Plus! A Literacy Framework for the Primary Grades, I especially noticed the chapter about writing, chapter four. In my first grade classroom, so far we have mainly focused our literacy on our Writer’s Workshop. In this way I think that my teacher focuses mainly on the second “emergent literacy” view on children’s writing (p. 45). We focus in my classroom on getting the children to put their thoughts on the paper. If A student can draw a picture of himself and a friend on their bicycles, and then they attempt to write a sentence or two about the picture they just created, we typically consider this a successful writing example. One problem I see with this is that not all of the students try their hardest when we say that anything they write is correct. There are some students who write just the first sounds of words, there are some students who write just the first and last sounds of words, some students try to write all the sounds they hear, and some students even try to include vowel sounds in their words. I think that we should encourage writing their ideas down as much as possible, but I also think that sometimes we need to encourage the student to move to the next level of creating words.
The traditional view of writing that places a high priority on the accuracy of spelling and letter formation (p. 45) is something that I have not seen in my classroom yet. We have not started spelling in the classroom yet, so this is probably why we have not placed an emphasis on correctness in writing. I am looking forward to seeing the writing workshop combine with the spelling we will expect from the students during our spelling weekly word lessons. I also have noticed in my classroom that many of the students do not use any type of sentence structure to make their workshop stories. I will see sentences with capital and lower case letters all randomly mixed up with no spaces between the letters, and the child will point to their picture, pretend to move their finger across the letters, and explain the picture they drew. There is no connection between the text and the picture, however the kids do make the connection that these things should go together.
Laura,
ReplyDeleteYour first grade writer’s workshop sounds very similar to my own classroom. We have a large range between my lower level readers and writer and my higher level readers and writers. We do not have a spelling program set up in my classroom. Instead, we urge the children to correctly spell their word wall “snap” words within the context of their writing. We do not formally test that they are correctly spelling these words through spelling tests but we do look through their daily writing samples to see if these words are being used and correctly spelled. Thus far, we are only urging children to sound out the first sound of each word. We are gradually scaffolding our children into spelling words but we do not follow “the traditional view of writing that places a high priority on the accuracy of spelling.” We do, however, place a high priority on letter formation. My CT feels that we need to “nip bad habits” in the beginning because it is easy to correct incorrect letter formation in the beginning than later down the road. We will be slowly introducing how to sound out words as the year progresses. We are starting with the first sound, then moving to the last sound, and finally incorporating the middle sounds. We also do not stress sounding out each letter individually. Instead, we try and sound out “chunks” so the children learn to identify chunks in words instead of just the sounds. For example: tion (s-h-u-n) as in education.