As a soon to be teacher I believe it's our job to keep making changes and updating our instruction for our students to benefit from. Frequently teachers get caught up in what they're comfortable with, or what has been working for them for years. If we aren't changing with the times we aren't helping our students evolve and grow to their full potential. When I was reading Tompkins I saw a few craft lessons that I thought would be great for teaching future 3rd graders. When I was working in a 3rd grade classroom as a sub one day, I had realized that the students were good at creating a story that had a beginning, middle and end. However, the students weren't connecting their sentences which off set the flow of the story. The majority of the sentences started with the characters name for example, "Nana went to the grocery store and they were out of muffins. Nana went to a bakery to get muffins there." I would make time as a teacher, knowing that this is a struggle in many kids writing, not just 3rd graders to spend time teaching transitional words. Tompkins says that teaching kids transition words helps students to "keep the sentence-to-sentence rhythm going in their writing." (2012, p. 75). I want to note here however that I would focus more on the ones that aren't as popular such as "besides", "meanwhile", "therefore". I think kids over use the ones they're taught to use to tell a story in 1st grade such as, "first", "second", "next" etc. Tompkins offers a mentor text "Suddenly! A Preston Pig Story", where students can investigate with putting other transition words in for the word "Suddenly" that is overused. I would love to try this one day with students!
If I taught a younger grade, In the Richards and Hawkes (2011) article they also talk about transition mini-lessons using a different mentor text, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. I think this just shows the importance of discussing effective transition words with your students and how mentor texts help students greatly during instruction. Richards and Hawkes offer a bunch of mini-lessons that help with word choice which is something I really believe is key in great writing. I really like "What words or phrases grab your attention", and "How does the author's words help you develop sensory images" (2011, p. 371). There are a lot of other great word choice lessons that caught my eye as well. When I was in my clinical the reading specialist I was working with, in her room had on her bulletin board a grave yard, and in the graveyard were "dead" words. The students knew that in their writing if they wrote one of the dead words to go back and find a better word choice. I think that this is definitely something I'd like to have in my classroom as a support to word choice mini lesson. With the combination of mentor texts, supporting word choice walls, to go with the mini lesson I think that my students will be successful. Mentor texts allow for young writers to have a positive example of what good writing looks like in an interactive way where they're both engaging with the text and learning the skill to incorporate into their own writing.
References
Rickards, D. & Hawes, S. (2006). Connecting reading and writing through author's craft. The Reading Teacher, 60(4), 370-373.
Well done Marissa! I'm impressed with the insights you immediately gained after reading the articles for Week 4. I agree, the additional types of instruction you described would certainly be beneficial for the students you had taught (or may teach).
ReplyDeleteMarissa, this was a great entry. I don't know if you were using this kind of "voice" or "stance" on purpose, but I could really hear you talking to other teachers -- almost as if you were in a job interview. I know I would have been impressed with the way you were able to share the key ideas you read and think about how you would bring them to life with different levels of readers/writers.
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