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When a Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures...

12/3/2017

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We all know the quote, "A picture is worth a thousand words". But, in the case of kindergarten writers, a word is worth a thousand pictures. 

Many kindergarten students come to school with incomplete mastery of letters and letter sounds, making it initially impossible for them to narrate events using words and sentences. However, from the very first day, kindergarten students can think up stories based on their experiences. In fact, they come to our classrooms full of ideas, eager  and happy to share them through various means with whomever will listen.

It may seem logical to wait until all of your kindergartners have mastered at least a majority of letters and letter sounds before explicitly teaching writing with your young students. However, as teachers we are charged with differentiating our instruction for all students, and there will be some kiddos in your classroom who know all of their letters, letter sounds, and some sight words when they walk through your door in September. Our teaching needs to support all levels of learning in our classrooms.

One way to begin explicitly teaching the writing process with young kindergarten students is to encourage them to compose using pictures until they acquire enough letter knowledge to begin encoding text.  A scope and sequence of mini-lessons that includes thinking of an idea, showing action on the page, creating characters, including dialogue, and having a beginning, middle, and end can all be taught using pictures as the vehicle for composition. As you use the language of the writing process, regardless of the fact that the kindergarten writers are drawing their stories instead of using text, you are creating mental pathways of understanding that will transfer to traditional writing as the students progress.

And each student's progression along a writing continuum must be our constant guide. 

But, keep in mind, as we introduce kindergarten writers to the wide and wonderful world of storytelling, our goal is to move them to mastery using words and sentences to tell stories as required by our state standards. (Our ultimate goal, in my humble opinion, is to nurture their love of storytelling, celebrate their unique voices, and embolden them to believe they have important stories to tell!) So, I want to address three practices that will help move all of our students toward that goal.

1.  Encourage lots and lots of oral storytelling from day one. Embed opportunities for students to tell their stories multiple times before they put their pencils to paper. The more often a writer has to consider the parts of his story as he tells it aloud to a listener, the more likely he will be able to capture it on paper, either through drawing or using words. When teachers worry that their kindergarten writers are failing because they aren't able to reread what they've recorded on paper, I suggest that there isn't a story at all if the writer can't remember it. This is not a failure of the writer; this is an as yet unfulfilled story. Writers at this level need stronger support with storytelling in order to orally compose a story that is held firmly enough in their memories to be remembered and reread on paper, even if recorded in scribbles!

2.  Remember that you are teaching toward mastery of composition with words and sentences. While we will, of course, encourage students to use pictures to compose (as needed) or support the story with details, the goal is not to teach drawing to the exclusion of text. When teachers explicitly teach student writers how to draw specific objects (people, houses, animals, trees, etc.) and expect them to be able to recreate the drawing on their own, the focus of learning shifts from story composition to drawing ability. I was in a classroom where two of the four students I conferenced with were more concerned with not being able to draw the animal as instructed by the teacher than with thinking of the information they wanted to include and how to compose it on the paper.

​3.  Conference, conference, conference! Here, as Lucy Calkins emphasizes, is the heart of our teaching. Every time we sit down with students and listen to their stories, whether we can follow along with the words on the paper or must depend on the writers' oral retelling, we have the opportunity to deepen students' understanding - wherever it sits on the developmental continuum. If you have a student whose drawing is indecipherable, with no letter support, your instruction will center around asking questions like, "What is happening in your picture?"; "Who is in your story?"; "What happened first, next, last?" By asking these questions in individual conferences as often as you can manage, you will be forging those thinking pathways that will fill up with letters and words when the students' word knowledge catches up with their love of storytelling. 

Remember the goal. We are growing writers. And when those young writers find the letters that match the sounds and put them on the paper, celebrate the word like it is worth a thousand pictures! 

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite






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Summertime, Summertime!

6/18/2017

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One of the most wonderful things about education is the constant opportunity to refresh and re-imagine our teaching practices every year as one academic season comes to an end and we look ahead to the next.

Summertime! Summertime! 

We turn our eyes forward even as we consider the successes and challenges that are behind us. And with nearly every aspect of our profession undergoing transformation as new thinking structures, digital pathways, and instructional pedagogies are changing the landscape, we must embrace this year-end reflection with gusto and begin thinking about next year.

After we go to the beach, of course!  :)

This year, I am looking back over my first year as a literacy coach and staff developer in my county. There have been wonderful opportunities for me to connect with teachers in so many school buildings and classrooms, and I have been able to sit at the table to share my ideas and offer my assistance with administrators and decision-makers. However, the days were not all easy or comfortable for me. In this position, I am nearly always seen as an outsider, and I have to work hard to establish trusting relationships. This, I found, is the single most important part of my job, because, without it, I cannot be effective.

This summer I will embrace the biggest and best opportunity so far! I was asked to work with a school to introduce writer's workshop across all grade levels this coming fall!!!! What!?! This is what I have been waiting for! This is the reason I wanted, sought, and accepted this position!!!

And now that I have this amazing chance to assist a talented faculty and visionary administrative team move towards  best practices in writing for each and every student in their school....I'm a little scared! How can I enter into this partnership and advise these teachers in ways that will work? In ways that are manageable? In ways that support sustainable instruction? In ways that invite engagement and excitement? How can I build those relationships and create trust?

I have been presenting writer's workshop sessions for many years now. And, there have been enough positive outcomes as reported by teachers who attended these professional development offerings that I have confidence in my message. But, in all of those instances, teachers chose to attend. Teachers who were hungry for support in establishing writer's workshop made the decision to be there. The faculty at the school I will be working with in just a few short months, for the most part, will not be making this decision independently. That is a huge and critical factor as I think about how to do this work. How can I present such a comprehensive instructional initiative in ways that are inviting, engaging, and sustainable?

Fortunately, I know that there are already teachers in this building who are ready to do this work. I know that the administrative team has clarity of vision and holds strong beliefs in the efficacy and importance of supporting their teachers as we strengthen writing instruction for all students. I know that there is already at least one team that is brimming with agency and urgency to do this work. And, if there is one thing I have learned as a coach this year, it is that you maximize the reach of the relationships you build in schools and tap into the positive energy that already flows through the classrooms and hallways. 

Building on those relationships, tapping into the positive energy, re-imaging how to share new practices to a veteran faculty...these are my starting points as I join the ranks of educators looking forward to a new year. 

Hmmmm...I think I just got an idea. I will tuck it into my imagination where it can play for awhile. Meanwhile, I wish all of the educators out there a restful break, no matter how short or how long, so that you have time to refresh and re-imagine all of the good work that is ahead!

Happy writing! 

​#allkidscanwrite

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What's in a Name?

2/5/2017

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." - William Shakespeare.  Oh, Mr. Shakespeare, how we all love your poetic wisdom. And all these many, many years later, your words still hold so many layers of meaning. Now that's good writing!!

"What's in a name?" I want to consider that question as it relates to writing instruction. Let's look at an example.  

I am working right now with a second grade teacher and her class on my graphic narrative unit. This is the 2.0 version of the writing work I did with first graders last year. I am so privileged to have been welcomed into a colleague's second grade class to further my understanding of how young students can access the writing process and produce a narrative product using primarily pictures to tell their stories. 

By the end of this week, the students had sketched four introductory seed stories on index cards reflecting their own experiences with solving problems with positive motion. They had each chosen the story they wanted to use for their graphic narrative and created the verb and adjective lists that would anchor their story panels. Finally, (said the students and me!) it was time to create a storyboard of their narratives. The writers laid out their stories across six thumbnails based on the action and feeling words they had already developed.

The composition process required the students to draft a six-panel story from the original 3-index card quickwrite (or quicksketch!). Let me show you mine:

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This was my model of a "quicksketch". My seed story was about a time I trick-or-treated for Unicef. Below the first sketch, I listed all of the verbs and adjectives that anchored the beginning of my story.
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After listing all of the verbs and adjectives for each of the three initial sketches (Beginning, Middle, End), I chose 2 from each list that most exactly told my story. I paired them up across this Word List organizer.
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Next, I took each pair of words (verb and adjective) and did a thumbnail representation of my story. At this point, the writer adds dialogue to help add context to the graphics for the reader. (These are the first three of my six thumbnails)
And here is where "What's in a name?" becomes a critical teaching question. As the second grade writers were moving their stories from a three-card beginning, middle, and end to a six-panel beginning, middle, and end, some important elaboration had to happen. And, as one student read his story to me from the thumbnails, he realized that he had left out an important part of his story - the motion he took to solve his problem. A critical revision was necessary for his story to be complete.

What's in a name? In this case, some of the most valuable instruction of the unit! When I saw students extending their compositions from 3- to 6-panels (think paragraphs in traditional narrative writing), I named their move! I called it elaboration because I need these writers to understand and internalize the thinking and intentional writing moves they are making so that they can apply them to any future writing. When I noticed the writer recognize that he had left out a part of his story, I called it revision so that he would have the process name for what he had just done with his sketches. 

One of the main objectives of this graphic narrative writing unit is for all students to have access to engaging in the writing process and producing a composition that tells an important story about a time in their lives when they saw a problem in the world and solved it using positive motion. Taking them through the writing process, but using pictures instead of sentences and paragraphs, provides a unique opportunity for students to experience the process from an entirely different perspective. 

The process is the same, but the product has a different name. It's still a narrative composition; but the pictures tell the story.

What's in a name?  When you want student writers to internalize and transfer the thinking that they do as writers, everything is in the name. We need to notice their moves, and name them! Importantly, writing teachers need to be sitting side-by-side in conferences with students in order to notice what they are doing and how they are thinking. Make it a daily practice.

Have a great writing week!

#allkidscanwrite
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Lessons From the Eagles' Nest...

1/9/2017

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Anyone who knows me is aware of my current obsession with the baby eagles on the AEF Eagle Cam in Northeast Florida. I have been captivated by this eagle family, from the time the parents returned to ready the nest for new babies to just this morning watching the nestlings huddled together for warmth in the breezy chill of a January morning. It is a rare opportunity to watch nature so close up and to see the instinctual way these stunning creatures raise and train their young. 

The parent eagles were clearly prepared to welcome their two offspring this past December. Romeo and Juliet, named by AEF members, arrived in early fall to get their nest ready. We watched them build the "rails" of the existing nest with sticks, often wrestling with and moving the small branches from place to place before getting it right. And they didn't let natural disaster deter them from being ready to lay eggs. Hurricane Matthew literally blew through the nest area, wreaking havoc on the nature there. But Romeo and Juliet simply took cover as necessary and then returned to their work as soon as it was clear.

Once the two eggs were laid, both of the parent eagles took turns incubating and rolling them, a 35-or-so-day process that required patience, perseverance, and teamwork. This pair of eagles clearly understood the process, and they pushed through day by day, hour by hour, following what they know to be the procedures that would give each of their babies the best chance of a healthy hatch.


And after the two babies hatched, a long and arduous process completed by the hatchlings with little or no assistance from parents, Romeo and Juliet began the months-long work of training and raising their youngsters to eventually fledge the nest, ready to fly off into their own futures as successful and beautiful raptors. From watching their babies struggle to break through the eggshells to making those eaglets reach for and grab the food from their parents' beaks which strengthens the eaglets' neck muscles, the adult eagles understand what needs to be done to best prepare their offspring to survive. Doing anything less than what is best for their babies is not an option. There are no "best practices". There is only what is best for these young. Period.

I believe there are some parallel lessons for writing teachers in the beautiful story of the eagles' nest. I wish I could write these lessons with the same glorious effect of the eagles vocalizing with each other before dawn from nest to nearby branch. The harmony of their calls is fluent and expressive, and the impact each eagle "voice" has on its mate is powerful. While I continue to work on my own writer's voice, I have promised this year to take the gloves off and speak my mind in a more direct way. So, I'm going to dig my own talons into this promise and suggest three lessons learned from the eagles.

Writing teachers must be prepared. We must come back to our classrooms each year in the early fall and build up our teaching "rails". While the foundation of how we taught writing in previous years may be solid, it is always necessary to strengthen and build on what we've done before. We can't afford to be satisfied with last year's lesson plans. Our students are different and the instruction that moves them forward must  be different to meet new needs and levels. Go to professional development opportunities. Read professional literature. Implement innovative pedagogical approaches. Move those sticks!

Writing teachers need patience, perseverance, and teamwork. We have 180 days each year, give or take, to affect our students' growth as writers. We need to make use of each and every one of those days, moving with patience as we help students build their understanding of the writing process and its purpose.

     *Effective writing teachers know that clear, concise, and expressive writing takes time, and so they give their students time across days and weeks to compose, revise, edit, and publish their work. Patience.

   *Effective writing teachers need to push past scheduling obstacles, instructional interruptions, challenging students, etc.  in order to give the children in their classrooms the best chance to find their voices in writing. Perseverance.

       *Effective writing teachers have a teammate or two (or more) that support the writing work. Teamwork allows writing teachers to share lessons, plan together, and build curriculum that advances student writers to new heights! Teamwork.

Writing teachers need to employ instructional strategies that best meet their students' needs. It is simply wrong to use teaching methods that are not explicitly aimed at what your students need. Period. And that means that writing teachers need to sit side by side with each and every student every week and listen to the writer talk about the work. And then the teacher needs to  offer the instructional nudge that will strengthen those writing muscles, then back off and let the writer fly. Doing anything less diminishes the chances that those writers will ever be strong enough to think and write and create and innovate and change their world using their writing voices when they leave the structure of the classroom. 


We need to teach so that every writer in our classroom has the same and equal chance to spread his or her writing wings and soar. 

Mother Nature says so. 

Happy Writing!

​#allkidscanwrite

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Reflections and Resolutions

1/1/2017

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Happy New Year!

Another new beginning! Don't you just love the feeling of a fresh start? Even though I know it's all theoretical...I mean it is just another morning in a continous string of regularly scheduled mornings, January 1st represents something more! And, really, it's the second fresh start of the year if you are a teacher. 

September 6th (or whatever day your school year started on) also felt like New Year's Day. You had lovingly prepared your classroom for a group of new students. Your first weeks' plans were written with dreams of unlimited potential. Your supplies were neatly stacked, still bundled in unopened packaging. The books in your library were leveled and neatly arranged in colorful bins or standing straight as soldiers on bookshelves in alphabetical order. Everything felt fresh and new. There was a sense of anticipation for what was about to begin for you and your students. 

And then the school bell rang. Those precious lives came in and sat in the seats in your classroom and the work began.

Now, here we are, four months later and nearly at the end of the second quarter of the academic shcool year. Almost the end of the first semester. Halfway done.  How have your classroom plans and dreams unfolded?


When I was in the classroom I always appreciated this winter break as a time to look back over those first months of the school year and to think about how it all went. Often, I would realize that the day-to-day work, the tight schedules, the shifting priorities, etc. had stolen the time I had planned to devote to new initiatives. My dreams for enriching or extending had been swallowed by the reality of keeping on instructional pace.

Rather than give up in frustration, I would work to rebuild those plans and dreams for the new year. Please, do not give up on those plans and dreams. You and your students deserve them!

January 1st is the perfect time to revisit, revive, or reinspire your teaching dreams, the ones you had on that first day of school when your plans were written with the enthusiastic belief that you and your students could accomplish anything this year! Close your eyes and summon that golden optimism, that "Yes we can!" ideal that drove your instruction and every interaction with your students in September. And once you feel that energy for planning and teaching and guiding your students to their absolute best, dive into some area of instruction that you didn't quite get to yet this year and fly with it!

May I suggest writing?  :)

I challenge you to forge a granite strong conviction to make time in your day, every single day, for you and your students to write!  The New Year is the perfect time to roll up your sleeves and dig into your schedule to find, designate, and protect time for writing. Every one of those precious children deserve the opportunity to find their voices, to express their thoughts, to tell their stories, to share their learning with the world. And it may truly require you to move mountains to make this happen...do it anyway!

Don't let the real and difficult struggles of the work year so far deter you from looking forward with renewed energy. Don't allow the limitations of tight schedules, pacing requirements, or testing expectations deflect your efforts to provide your students access to authentic learning experiences, especially in writing. As educators, our New Year's resolutions should always be to dig deep and reflect on our practices to see how we can continue to lift the level of our teaching to help our students reach their goals going into the second half of the year. For the second half of this year, make writing a priority in your classroom. I'll work alongside you. 

Happy New Year! Happy Writing!

​#allkidscanwrite






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A New Year...A New Story

8/5/2016

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It truly is the most wonderful time of the year! I am brimming with hope and excitement and anticipation of what this coming school year will bring. Another opportunity to work with teachers. Another opportunity to dive into the wondrous layers of literacy with colleagues, anchored by the voices of innovative authors and researchers. Another chance to learn and grow and look for possibilities in our own practices. And, most important...

...another gift of time with students - time to help them maximize their potential in every single way we can.

And this year, everything has changed for me. 

I have been given the greatest job in the world! I will be a literacy coach on the district level this year! And while I will miss beyond words the day to day work I have been doing with students and teachers in one building, my eyes are wide with excitement at the thought of working with lots of students and more teachers in many buildings across our county.

One of the charges of my new position, and something that I have embraced throughout my career, is providing professional development for teachers. And, of course, as you know by now, my passion is elementary writing. This summer I have already done one PD session for a group of amazing teachers. I am gearing up for two more sessions week after next. Coincidentally, my new supervisor handed me a book on coaching this past week, Instructional Coaching, A Partnership Approach to Improving Instruction, by Jim Knight.  I have just begun reading this book, but it already resonates with my own beliefs... 

...and has nudged to the forefront of my professional reflection one critical question -
Does one stop professional development work?

I struggle with this question because that is, in fact, what I have been and will be doing. And I am way too invested in building capacity in teachers of elementary writing to be okay with the idea that my sessions are possibly minimally useful in terms of helping them build best practices in their classrooms. As a new instructional coach  I want to be available beyond one 4-hour PD session. I want to support the implementation. I want to be side-by-side during the teaching. I want the teachers to feel a coaching presence as they take risks in their writing practice with students. 

Building our students' writing confidence, helping them discover their voices, giving them authentic opportunities to craft stories, articles, poems, essays, research papers, etc. in every content area is too important to not do right.

So, one thing I am thinking about is adding a Google Classroom piece to my sessions. That way, we could stay connected throughout the school year. Teachers might have questions for me or each other that could be shared electronically. Perhaps we might even set up additional face-to-face meetings across the year for those who want to share artifacts or stories of challenges and successes. I will be working on this idea this week. 


One of the battle cries of the new school year in my county is that we need to write our own story. I. Love. This.

We all walk in this world together, but we don't always see the story the same way. So we need to tell our stories to each other. To make clear the good work that we are doing with students. It may not always be easy or pretty. But honest reflection with ourselves and with each other always helps. And we need to provide every student in every classroom the same opportunity to tell their story to the world.

As I walk this new walk of being a literacy coach, I will share my story with you. On the brink of this new year, I simply can't wait to shout from the rooftops that...

#allkidscanwrite.

Have a great writing week!

​

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A Tale of Two Objectives

5/8/2016

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If there is one thing I have learned in this year of teaching kindergarten writers, it is how asynchronous the abilities of 5 year old authors can be. On one hand, children in their first year of formal schooling are brimming with voice and very willing to take risks, leaping off the writing cliff as soon as I say, "Go!" There has not been one day of writing when these students were not one hundred percent "in". They have been like little sponges, soaking up our instruction and putting thoughts and ideas and pictures on paper like nobody's business.

But...they are 5 year olds. And their handwriting and spelling reflect their developmental levels. Don't get me wrong. Many of our kindergartners are using proper capitalization and punctuation, as well as spelling high frequency words correctly in their drafts. But, then there are those that still struggle to form letters correctly. Those that forget to capitalize the first letter of the sentence or add punctuation to the end. Those whose thoughts are still getting a little knotted up on the trip between their brains and their hands.

When is it appropriate to expect student writers to be responsible for editing their work?

As I look over the writers' nonfiction books about rhinos, I wonder what to do about those many pages that need capital letters, periods, spelling corrections, neater handwriting...

Do I instead concentrate on the content objective? After all, these writers have done research using internet websites and books. They have used graphic organizers to keep their notes together. They have written a three page book about their topic. They have illustrated their pages. They have read and reread their books to the teachers and to each other.

And they have worked for about two weeks on these books. 

At a higher grade level, I would have considered these first efforts "drafts".  And I would have expected students to go back and revise and edit their work for their final copies. But, can I expect a kindergartner to go back in and fix every misspelled word? Erase and rewrite every misshaped letter? Figure out where one sentence ends and the next begins?

Ideally, I think I would move even a little slower with this work the next time I teach it. Perhaps additional modeling of writing the sentences, and maybe providing a bank of words that accompany the topic in general would provide needed support for the less developed writers.

We are going to try this unit again. Next week, in fact. We are going to let the students choose another animal, and we are going to go through the process once more. While I think we may give them more choice in the research and scope of subtopics in the next nonfiction "All-About" book, I will definitely teach more toward how the writers are putting their work on the pages. 

And, so, if our objective was to do research and learn about a topic, and then write an "All-About" book to teach readers all we know about that topic, I think the kindergartners achieved that objective.
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If our objective was to work toward consistent control of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, I think we still have work to do. And that's okay. As we all know so well, both the composition work and the technical work of writing are built upon layers of learning that are individual to each unique writer. What each writer in our class did learn from this unit was what nonfiction writing can be, how to do research about a topic, some text features that help readers find information in books, and all about the body, food, and habitat of the rhinoceros.

Good stuff!! And next week we will tap again into their enthusiasm and listen for their voices and support them in their usage and mechanics when we start the next "All-About" book. I can hardly wait.

​Have a great writing week.

#allkidscanwrite
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Active Teaching

5/1/2016

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When my daughter was only a few weeks old, I took her to the doctor for a well baby check up. I had a question for the doctor. To me, the question was important and I expected a long and thoughtful answer from the pediatrician. But, instead, he gave me a cursory, almost abrupt response that was more dismissive than helpful. I suppose he had heard this same question many times before. Being a young mother, I did not know how to react. But, you can see that even twenty-seven years later, I wish that he had considered my question in the moment. I may have been that doctor's 1,000th new mom, but this was my very first baby.

Teaching is like that, too. Every child who  sits in our classrooms is there for only one year. It does not matter to the students in our class this year that we have already taught the same unit five, or ten, or fifteen times before. This is the one and only opportunity we have to make a difference in their writing lives. We need to make it feel like the first time we are teaching each and every lesson. And, if we do that, we will find our lessons constantly evolving into more thoughtful and responsive instruction. I am going to call this "Active Teaching" because it calls on us to be active - thinking, reflecting, listening, changing, reacting!

I had a reminder of the importance of active teaching this week. I am teaching the Graphic Narrative unit of study for the third and fourth times in our last two first grade classrooms. As I am moving through the lessons, I can feel myself already tempted to move too quickly. From my perspective, I feel more practiced in the instruction and want to go more quickly. That seems natural.

But, I can't forget that this is not the third and fourth time these students are writing graphic narratives. It is the first time, and they deserve the same thoughtful, measured instruction as the first group of students I taught.

And so, as I was showing the students how to build the context for their first story panels, I realized that many of the writers were having trouble deciding what verbs and adjectives were the beginning of their stories. Which were the middle? This part of the composition process was proving difficult for them.

And then it occurred to me. I was doing less modeling with these two classes than in the first two. After all, I already had my model to display my work. Couldn't I just show them the end result?

In a word. No. That is not active teaching.

So, I have done some thinking and have come up with two ideas. First, I am going to begin a new graphic narrative of my own and work through it right along with the students in these two classes. Just as I did with the first classes.

Second, I recreated the drafting pages for the story panels. Last month we had a professional cartoonist visit our writers, and he talked about "thumbnails", quick sketches artists make to capture an idea in a general way. So, I made a thumbnail template that is more student friendly for our graphic narrative writers. Now, each writer knows to list one verb and one adjective under each story panel. They will compose text for a speech bubble for each panel as well, one at a time. And they will continue that work across the six thumbnails. In this way, they will build their narratives and sketch their graphic storytelling panels in the same order of their word lists. 

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Across the board, my current students are finding this new format an easier method of composition. I am hopeful that the thumbnail template along with my own in-the-moment modeling will help these writers create successful graphic narratives.

Whether doctoring or teaching, staying in the moment with those whose work or lives you are influencing is critical. Active teaching ensures that we approach each lesson with the same energy, attention, and reflection as if it were our first time teaching it. Our students deserve no less.

Have a great writing week!

​#allkidscanwrite
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When just a little has to be enough...

4/24/2016

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"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could only do a little." - Edmund Burke.
     And isn't that the way we often feel when we teach writing to young students? That we can "only do a little"? Our work with them in the precious year we have together seems so fleeting. How can we possibly have made a difference in their writing lives when they leave our classrooms in June? 
     We do make a difference when we teach writers and not writing. When our focus is on helping the writers sitting in our rooms develop habits of mind that are sustainable beyond our doorways, we are extending the influence of our teaching beyond the moment. I had a personal reminder of the importance of valuing small influences this week.
     As writing teachers, we must firmly and with clear vision understand the impact of our time with our students. We may "only have a year" with these writers. Or, we may "have a whole year" with these writers!! It depends on your perspective. I say embrace every bit of the teaching time you have with your writers. In the scope of their learning lives, it may seem like "a little". But some piece of your instruction may, in fact, change the way they think about writing for the rest of their lives!
     This week in kindergarten, we began our eighth unit of study - "All About" Books. One of the most important goals of a coach, whether coaching a student or a colleague, is the gradual release of responsibility. My colleague, the teacher who welcomed me as a coach into her room last September, has taken on the role of principal planner for this unit. She and I have worked so well together this year; our collaboration has been full of great discussion and side-by-side teaching. She had a vision of moving our students into a nonfiction writing project, and her vision is defining the unit.
     Our first objective was to expose the students to the idea of doing research. They will be writing a book about rhinos as we teach the mode of writing to inform. The teacher's first lesson was centered around using an online site to do research. Here is her plan:


Lesson Objective:    Students will learn how to use an online site to find fun facts (research) for their "All About" book topics.

Materials:    Classroom projector
                     Online database or research site
                     Chart
                     Markers

Connect:    Tell students that today we are starting a new project. Remind them that they have been working on telling stories from their own lives  using pictures and words in their journals. That is called narrative writing. Today, they are going to learn to write about “true” things. That is called informational writing. Say, “We are going to do ‘research’. Does anyone know what that means?’ Wait for answers. Then add, ‘Research means you find information about something so that you can write about it for a reader.’”

Teach:    Today we are going to learn about rhinos! That will be the topic for our very first "All About" book. Does anyone know anything about rhinos?

Make a chart of any ideas the children have about rhinos. (They are big. They have big bodies. They like mud. They like to run fast.)

Tell the students that some of what they think may be true, some may not. Tell them that we will do research to find out. Discuss with the students that not everything you read on the internet may be true. It is important to use only those sites that have good information.

Go to the site you have chosen.

On the first site we chose, we noticed there were different categories about the rhino - Habitat, Body, Life Cycle, Food, Fun Facts, Related Articles.

Depending on the amount of time you have, decide how many categories to explore in a session. We guided the students through each one, listening to text read aloud, clicking on highlighted keywords, and discussing the content.

Active Engagement:    After exploring the site for as much time as you decide, lead the class in a discussion of what was learned. Write the information on chart paper. You will find that they remember the information that was most appealing to them!

Example:

All About Rhinos

  • They weigh 5,000 lbs.
  • They have one or two horns.
  • They are endangered.
  • They eat 30-60 lbs of food every day.
  • They are mammals (mommies feed their babies milk; hair or fur on their bodies; warm-blooded; breathe air)
  • Their habitat is the grasslands (African savannah or in India).
  • They eat grass and leaves.

Link:        Read over the facts that the students have learned from using the online site. Remind them that online databases help you find out what is important about a nonfiction topic when you are doing research.

We will spend additional time looking at online sites and adding to our chart. Next, we will begin working with the idea of organizing our information for our readers.

As I watch my colleague working on this unit of study, I remember that I will not be in her classroom next year. And I wonder if we have had enough time together for my coaching to have been of lasting value to her. 

In the end, it may have been "just a little". But, it also might have been just enough!

Do all that you can for your writers. We may never know the true scope of our influence. But we will always know that we taught them what we could in the time we had with them. 

#allkidscanwrite

and

#allteacherscanteach

Have a great writing week!

​
 

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Oops.....

4/22/2016

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Last Sunday's post ended up being published on the main blog page. Sorry for the mix-up! I'll see you here again this Sunday!

Hope you're having a great writing week.

#allkidscanwrite

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