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Deep Breathing and Lifting the Level of Instruction.

11/29/2015

I am taking a deep breath. Ahhhhhh.......

We have survived the first quarter, sent out and received back first report cards, made it to Thanksgiving. And now we have exactly three weeks until Winter Break. Soon after which we will begin our nervous slide into the third quarter and the inevitable test prep season. Well, at least in the upper elementary grades. But, the nervousness is pervasive in a school building. Everyone feels it. Even in kindergarten.

So, join me now in taking a nice, relaxing deep breath. We are in the quiet season between the holidays. I don't mean quiet in terms of activity. I mean quiet in terms of the academic race.

And in our classroom, our ABC's of Kindergarten books are well under way. We are on letter "f". Hmmm. That's a lot of letters left in the alphabet. I'm beginning to wonder how we are going to sustain the excitement all the way to letter "z"! I have struggled every step of the way straddling the instructional line with our kindergartners. Do we lift the level of writing and expect more of these young writers? Or do we settle down and wait until all of them grow into the instruction we have already implemented?

My tendency is to push on. Raise the bar. Move them toward the expectation of multiple words beginning with the letter of the day. How will I know if they can do it if I don't ask them to? On the other hand, some of our writers are just now getting the hang of neatly writing the upper and lowercase letters and writing the word of the day correctly on the handwriting lines. Will adding another layer shut them down?

I don't think so. And, furthermore, their classroom teacher and I firmly believe in scaffolding our instruction, and we are realistic in our expectations of their products. We know that some writers will immediately try any strategy we present, while others will stay steadfast in the level of effort at which they are comfortable.

Where we are starting to need more side-by-side teaching is helping students write their words correctly on the handwriting lines. As the class brainstorms kindergarten words starting with the letter of the day, the teacher or I write them correctly on a handwriting-lined white board. We take considerable time forming the letters and talking about the placement of each of the letters in every word. But, some of the words are long! Or are certainly brand new to these authors' pencils! Their ability to transfer the correct formation of the words from the white board onto their own papers is shaky. This is where we find most of our teaching happening right now.

And, that's as it should be. These are kindergartners, after all. They are supposed to be learning how to form letters and spell words. It's all good!

But, it's okay to invite them to add another word to their page, right?

Below is one of our writers' page for letter "d". His caption.."Mrs. Dunn riding on a dragon."

See! He did it! We suggested and he responded. Sometimes I think that teachers are hesitant to ask their student writers to stretch beyond very basic expectations. I remember a second grade teacher once telling me at the end of the first semester that she was getting ready to teach the students about paragraphs. What?! She believed that paragraphing was a skill not to be even introduced until February? And this is a teacher that I greatly admire. She is one of the best. And while she is correct that some second graders will struggle with the art of paragraphing mid-year (or beyond), there are surely many students in her classroom that need only her instruction to move them to that level of composition.

Raise that bar! Believe that they can do it! If you really do push too far, you will quickly realize it and can step back a bit until more students are ready. But, I will be surprised if many of your writers don't respond just like our author above did and try whatever you teach them.

Lift the level. Model. Use a mentor text. Accept approximations. Take a deep breath and believe :)

#allkidscanwrite

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More...or Less!

11/22/2015

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Sometimes, less is more!

You may find, as I have, that our student writers often fall into two categories - those who love to write stories, and those who love to write the facts, and just the facts, ma'am!

As we move through our ABC Book unit of study in kindergarten, we are beginning to see some of the writers, who were as yet unable to produce a cohesive narrative in our previous units, find their writing groove on the pages of their ABC books. Perhaps it is a right brain-left brain sort of thing, but I do believe that writers tend to gravitate toward the kinds of writing that align with the way they think along a fiction/nonfiction continuum. Or maybe it's just that writing a word and illustrating that word with just one picture is more in line with where our young writers are developmentally!

I don't think the reason really matters. What does matter in a great big way is how we use the newly discovered evidence of ability and feelings of confidence that these previously reluctant writers exhibit- and compliment the heck out them!! I remember Lucy Calkins once telling us that in the writer's conference, the teacher should give the student a compliment as big as a paragraph!! There is no overstating the importance of finding what each writer does well and making that a very big deal. This is what builds in a writer the knowledge that he or she can do this! When I taught 3rd and 4th graders, I was often frustrated by some of those students' total lack of self-confidence, their feelings of inability and ineffectiveness as writers.

For every one of those students who struggle to compose, teachers need to watch like hawks for the smallest craft moves and give them the longest, sincerest compliments possible! That is the kind of instructional support that builds a student's belief in himself or herself as a writer.

Below is one of our most reluctant writer's ABC book in progress. He often cried when we were working on our earlier narrative units, and his work was very rudimentary - even with lots of support and side-by-side teaching.

His pictures of art, ball, calendar, and door are still very simple. However, he is much more engaged in this unit of study. This little writer no longer cries during writing workshop. And we are praising his effort and work every chance we get!

Next, is the work of another writer who struggled with our earlier narrative units. His writing often involved entire pages covered in random drawings that seemed to have no connection to each other.

What I absolutely love about this writer's ABC book is the attention to detail that he is showing toward his writing and illustrations, and the single idea that he is able to maintain throughout each day's workshop. His work is neat and organized and informative!!

And, so, as I have seen before in my experiences in working with elementary age writers, just when you think you've done everything you can to help a writer move forward, with little success - change up the mode! Try giving that reluctant writer a different kind of work. You will probably be happily surprised and your young writer will discover his or her voice!

Never give up!

Next time I will share with you some of the results we got when we invited students to try using more than one word on each letter page of their ABC book. We showed a video that had alliterative phrases using the letters of the alphabet - "An army of ants". We encouraged our writers to try their hand at choosing two words to illustrate their letter. We further suggested that they choose word pairs that might be nonsensical and make their readers laugh!

Tune in next week and see how some of our writers really stepped up to that challenge!

#allkidscanwrite

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One Step Back...Reflect and Move Forward

11/18/2015

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...Work backwards. That's what we have to do as writing teachers. We think about our units and identify the objectives we want our students to master. Then we write the lessons that will move our writers forward - moving them towards achieving those objectives.

When we began our current Literary and Practical Nonfiction Writing unit of study, I hadn't completely thought through what I hoped the students' finished products would look like. In my mind, I was remembering that other year in first grade and how it seemed my students then just seemed to have a topic they felt "expert" about. All I had to do was teach text features and craft moves. Ha!

I am very sure it was not that easy.

This time, I am teaching under an entirely different set of circumstances. I am beginning my writing instruction with this group of first graders with a nonfiction unit. Last time, I had already taught narrative units on Launching the Writing Workshop, Where Writers Get Ideas, Illustration Study, and How To Read Like a Writer by the time we got to this informational unit. These students have never made a picture book. Last time, my first graders had already written four or more picture books. Some of them had written a lot more!

All of this is to say that as I teach this unit, I am having to work backwards even more in order to make sure these writers have the understandings they will need to be successful authors of a picture book about a season.

No problem.

Reflect. Adjust. Move on.

So, I have added two lessons (so far) to the original seven in this Unit of Study. The first is a Prewriting Research lesson in which I read the book, Sky Tree, by Thomas Locker, and I used his quote to suggest to the students that authors often write nonfiction books about topics they are experts in -

“I have spent most of my life learning to paint trees against the ever changing sky. After all these years I still cannot look at a tree without being filled with a sense of wonder.”

We talked about how the students needed to become "experts" in the season they chose to be the topic of their picture book. I modeled how to use the books from our library stack to add to what they already knew about that season. The writers collaborated with others who were writing about the same season. They helped one another fill out a brainstorming grid with blocks for subtopics such as weather, holidays, outdoor activities, indoor activities, foods, colors, clothes, etc. They deepened their knowledge base and at the same time hopefully increased their confidence as nonfiction authors.

The second lesson I added was a scope and sequence lesson. I realized that these writers had little to no idea how to make a nonfiction picture book. So, we took our mentor text, Whales and Dolphins, by Judy Allen and Mike Bostock, and spent a lot of time looking at the Contents page. We discussed how to lay subtopics across the pages, one at a time, with text and illustration support. We then looked back at our brainstorming grids and chose at least four subtopics to include in our books. We chatted about a glossary. We looked at the Index.

It was a start...and I definitely feel that these writers now have a better idea of how to make this kind of writing. Tomorrow we will begin to draft and draw. I hope the students are excited as I am!

In all honesty, no two years of teaching writing are ever the same. Even at the same grade level. The teacher rethinks her lessons. New mentor texts are uncovered. Fresh ideas surface. Past missteps invite walking down new instructional paths...

And, most importantly, new writers sit in the seats of our classrooms. They bring their unique experiences, their brand new influences, and their crisp, clear voices to our teaching.

It is always magical. Backwards or not!

#allkidscanwrite

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ABC's...finally!

11/14/2015

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We started our Kindergarten ABC book this past week! It seems like I should add, finally! to that statement!

When I facilitated a professional development session in August, I came to the table with pretty much nothing in terms of Units of Study for kindergarten. Having never worked with such young and inexperienced students, I was at a loss as to how we should begin writing instruction with students who, well, couldn't write!

Luckily, I was in a room full of seasoned kindergarten and first grade teachers; they put their heads together and came up with some great ideas. The suggestion I heard over and over again was to have the students make an ABC book. The students would be learning how to form the letters, would be working with the concept of beginning sounds in words, and would be strengthening their encoding skills on each and every page! Brilliant!

Afterwards, the classroom teacher and I talked at length about it, and we decided to begin the year helping the students develop the idea of "story" (beginning, middle, end; about something, etc.) as a starting point for our writing instruction. We knew all of the students could draw pictures, and that was an immediate access point for them to learn about storytelling and voice and ideas - way, way before they were going to be able to write letters, words, and sentences. And, so, we spent our first two units (Launching the Kindergarten Writers' Workshop and Authors as Mentors) building that foundation while the kindergarteners were environmentally exposed to alphabetics across the days and weeks of the first quarter.

Our first two units have gone well, according to the kindergarten teacher in the room who has been doing this for years. She often comments on how differently she feels about writing this year. Happier. And she says her past students never had the sense of story that these writers do now.

So, it's gone well. But, to be honest, after a little over two weeks in our last unit, working with the students on their The Very Hungry.... books, we made the decision to put them away until a little later in the year. Each student illustrated 7 pages (Sunday through Saturday) showing their very hungry main character looking for food on Sunday, eating increasing numbers of foods each weekday, and then eating a whole bunch of food on Saturday, just like in Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Our last lesson called for the students to try to come up with their own repeating phrase (much like Eric Carle's "...but he was still hungry"). Some students were able to think of a repeating phrase - "...but he kept on eating"; "...but he was still looking for food"; "...and he just kept getting bigger". Other students did not get that far.

At that point we decided we wanted the writers to be able to, on their own, write the words that told their stories. And that seemed to us to be work for a little ways down the road. So, we talked to each author, made sure to capture his or her story on a note-taking sheet, and filed those gems away to finish at a later date. :)

And we jumped right into our next unit!! The students are excited and ready to try something new. And we know it is time to start focusing on letter, word, and sentence formation.

The classroom teacher brought out her stack of ABC books, we gathered a few more from the library and my room. And then we chose our mentor text, ABC Animal Jamboree, written by Giles Andreae and illustrated by David Wojtowycz.

Our first lesson was the immersion lesson.

We connected this new mentor text to the Eric Carle book we used as our examplar in the last unit of study, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
We read the ABC Animal Jamboree, asking the students to pay close attention to how the letters were placed on the page, how the word began with the letter at the top of the page, how the picture illustrated the word on the page, etc.
We made a chart of what they noticed.
And then we showed them a stack of ABC books - books about birds, books about race cars, books about furry animals, books about freshwater fish, books about pilgrims...lots of books!
Groups of two or three students each took a book and went off to look through and make observations of how the book was organized.
We came back together and shared what we noticed.

Not surprisingly, the students mostly noticed things about the content on the pages (lots of different birds, lots of different butterflies, etc.) and not much about the writer's and illustrator's craft. But, that's okay. That's what we're here for! :)

Finally, we told the student writers that we are all going to write about the same topic for this unit- Kindergarten!! We decided to do it this way so that the students would not need to spend so much cognitive power on subject matter, leaving them fully charged to work on letters, words, and illustrations.

Our method going forward will be to work on one letter each day (maybe two if the students can handle it). We will give each student a half sheet page (see below) and the classroom teacher will model how to form the uppercase and lowercase letters correctly on the board. The students will then write the letters on their pages. Next, we will brainstorm as a class all of the the words that begin with "a" (b,c,d, etc.) that have to do with our topic, kindergarten. Each student will choose whichever word from our list that he or she wants to represent that letter in his or her book. Or they may think of another! And then, the authors will illustrate the word.

I hope to have some examples to share with you next week! The unit is designed to provide scaffolding for those students who will need extra support as they form letters, phonetically sound out words, and illustrate them. But we also believe it gives those writers who are ready an extension opportunity - they may write phrases or sentences that go along with their illustrations.

Without a doubt, we can see that all of our writers are ready!! ABC's - here we go!

#allkidscanwrite

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Brass Tacks and Self-Directed Learning

11/11/2015

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So, let's get down to brass tacks! One thing I have always wanted this blog to be is instructionally useful. I have tried to speak to what we are doing in our classrooms in a way that would be helpful to anyone reading my posts. But, I think I need to be more specific. I may not be able to capture an entire week's worth of work that way, but the whole point of this blog is to share our practice in such a way that anyone who is looking for support or ideas or resources can find something here.

I learned how to teach writing from Lucy Calkins - mostly through reading her books and using the teaching resources that came out of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. I read her monumental work, The Art of Teaching Writing (1994), and that changed everything. I bought the Units of Study for For Teaching Writing, Grades 3-5 (2007) and used it in my 4th grade classroom for five years...until I bought the newer grade-level set and used it for several years after that. I traveled to New York City to attend Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Institutes three times to learn in person how to best teach writing to elementary school students. I learned how to teach primary writing from Katie Wood Ray. I read her books, In Pictures and Words: Teaching the Qualities of Good Writing Through Illustration Study (2010) and About the Authors: Writing Workshop With Our Youngest Writers (2005). I also read Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom (1999) and Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop (2006). I traveled to Asheville, NC to hear and see her in person and it changed everything. Again.

I was blessed with having the resources to support my passion. I know that many of you reading this do not have the resources to travel to New York City for writing institutes, the time to sit and read lengthy books, or simply don't have the crazy drive I do for learning about writing instruction.

But, the fact remains that it does take self-directed learning to strengthen our practice when it comes to teaching writing. In every single school in which I have taught, there have been teachers who admit outright that they don't like to teach writing, don't understand how to teach writing, would rather set their hair on fire than teach writing. It is the first thing to go when schedules get tight. And, you know because I've said it here, where I teach, writing is no longer assessed on the state level in elementary school. I hope that the removal of the state writing test in 5th grade in my state and district does not deter all teachers from fiercely protecting writing time, from teaching writing with a sense of urgency, and from actively pursuing their own advancement in writing instruction pedagogy.

So, back to brass tacks. I would be so happy if this blog was a place you could come to for a little self-directed learning. I am going to try to post more hands-on, try-it-in-your room lessons as we go along. Please let me know if this is helpful to you. Or not.

I mentioned last week that we are going to be starting a nonfiction writing unit in first grade next week. I had started out calling it a Literary Nonfiction unit; but, I think it could be more practical than literary. Perhaps a mix of both!

Literary and Practical Nonfiction - Lesson 1 - Immersion

I believe that when you are beginning any new unit, a day or two of immersion is critically important. By this, I mean introducing writers to a mode of writing by showing them lots of different examples of that kind of writing. I like to make this an inquiry- based exploration. Instead of me sitting in front of the class, pointing out the features of the writing that I would like them to notice, I pass out examples of the writing to the students so that they can put their own hands and eyes on the text and notice the writers' and illustrators' moves on the pages. I pass out sticky notes along with the books, and encourage the students to spend some time in the pages of the books, writing down what they notice about the writing as they go.

I will begin the immersion lesson by reading an example of a nonfiction book aloud. I will make notes on the ways the authors have presented information in the text as I read. I have chosen Whales and Dolphins, by Judy Allen and Mike Bostock to read to the students. I love this book for so many reasons (colorful, table of contents, subject matter, index). But my favorite feature, and the one that I will highlight with the students, is the use of flaps within the book. Each topic is spread across two pages, and on the right side of each two-page spread, there is a vertical half-page flap that has questions about that topic written on it. In order to find out the answers, the reader lifts the flap! So interactive and engaging - and definitely something some of our first grade writers might want to try!! I might share with them that I used this book as a model for a paper book that I wrote for our Virginia Brook Trout project a few years ago (see picture inset above).

After I have finished modeling what I want the students to do, I will pair them up and ask them to choose one of the books from our stack of nonfiction examples. Then I will send them on their way to explore their books just as I did mine. You may decide to extend this lesson to two days if your students are engaged and working well and are self-directed enough to stay on task with this work. At whatever point you feel like the class has extrapolated all that they can from working in pairs, exploring the books and taking notes, call them back and create a class chart based on what they noticed.

The next steps will be six or seven lessons taught each day or so that focus on one interesting way that authors present factual information to their readers. I will read a book with a new "text twist" and invite the students to try the presentation move if they so choose. In my post last Wednesday, I listed those books and the writers' moves I am going to highlight in this unit. I also mentioned that every student in our classroom will be choosing one of the four seasons as their topic. By narrowing the array of subjects the students are working on in the room, I believe I can support them better in their writing process. They will still have choice, but it will be choice within a subject in which they already have a knowledge base (seasons). I found that it was way too optimistic to think that first graders working on their first nonfiction writing could manage to research and write at the same time!

I hope that these few brass tacks I've shared today can be the beginning of your self-directed learning. If you want more of this kind of post, please comment below.

I can't wait to get started!!!

#allkidscanwrite

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The Heart of Our Teaching

11/8/2015

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"The Very Hungry Ladybug"

I ran into a former colleague this week; she was on my team the year I taught first grade. She never ceased to amaze me with her generosity that year, both in sharing her lessons and resources with me as well as in talking me off the ledge more than once as I struggled to understand how those 6- and 7-year olds learned. Remember, I stepped into first grade after eight years of teaching gifted fourth graders. I simply could not have done it without her!!

When I saw her this week, she mentioned that she was still teaching writing the way I presented it to them that year. That made me feel so good, I quickly added, "Well, then you should be reading my blog!" I wanted to encourage her and my intent was to celebrate her excitement, but...

She reacted just as quickly by taking a step backward. "Oh, no. That just makes me feel like I'm not doing it right. I can't read those things. I don't even look at Pinterest." (I may be slightly misquoting my colleague. But this was most definitely the gist of what she was saying to me. Forgive me, teacher friend!)

Outwardly, I tried to hold onto my smile.

Inwardly, I gulped.

On this blog, I try to present the best of what is happening in our classrooms. My hope has always been to highlight what is possible with our youngest writers. But in my room, just like in yours, there are many other writers whose work is less developed; and their stories are often not wholly composed and many times minimally captured through illustration. These are the students beside whom we sit day after day, asking them to tell us what is happening on the page. Asking them what their story is about. Because we can't tell from the drawings. For every student whose work I have proudly displayed here, there are many others whose writing is much more approximated.

And, after a full quarter of the school year, we know which students need more scaffolds. Which students require more persistent nudging. Which students are the quiet strugglers who never ask for help, but who need someone to listen to their story to help them capture it on paper.

So, today, I am going to share one of those writers' stories. We believe in them as surely as we believe in the writers whose stories are clearly written, consistently told, and fully illustrated. You are right, my teacher friend! I need to be highlighting more writers who are approximating composition based on our instruction. This is the heart of our teaching. For all of us!!

Below are the pages of one of our writer's book, The Very Hungry Shark. You can see on the "Sunday", "Monday", and "Tuesday" pages that this writer is literally all over the page with his illustrations. You cannot tell what his main character is, and there is little to no consistency across the pages, despite our explicit instruction to try and draw the same character each day.

But, then, look at "Wednesday" and "Thursday"! Suddenly, we see a main character that looks the same on each page. There are also some other characters that appear on both days. The writer was supposed to show the shark eating a certain number of the same food each day. By Wednesday, he was to have been eating three and by Thursday, four. I don't think that is clear on either page, although I think I see a "4" up in the corner of Thursday. So, in order to understand this writer's story, I will need to sit next to him and have him tell me what is happening on each page.

That's okay! I will tell him I can see how hard he is working, and I will absolutely gush over his work on the last two pages. Clearly, he has been working toward our instructional objectives...he just needs more time, maybe a lot more time, to approach mastery. (Side note: On the "Monday" page, he told us his shark was eating "spicy burritos" - that's the kind of voice that you just can't teach :)

On the face of it, this work may not appear to be at all cohesive. You may think, "There is no story here, no sir!" And where are the words? Where is the "writing"?

Oh, it is in there! I promise you. We have chosen to take a path in this kindergarten classroom that puts understanding story first. And we have oodles of writings to show that most of our students do understand. But we have lots and lots and lots of work to do with these children to help them connect their wonderful compositions in art to letters and words that carry meaning across time. We are far, far from that place with most of our students.

So, at the end of the day, teaching writing to kindergartners and first graders is challenging and requires patience and persistence. There is no magic to what we are doing at my school. We are just going in there every single day and talking to kindergartners in exactly the same way we would talk to Mr. Eric Carle. Some of our writers will add words and sentences much earlier than others. But we will keep sitting next to each of them, day in and day out, because we believe. Honestly, I think that is the only solid requirement for teaching writing to anyone - you have to believe they can do it! And they will!

#allkidscanwrite

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Sketchbooks and Stories

11/4/2015

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In her first scene, this writer shows and tells how she and her mommy feel after her mother's surgery. You can see the feelings on their faces. She 'walked to the kitchen to get ice water for her'.

In the second scene, the writer and her mom are smiling. They both feel better and the writer 'walked back to the sunroom with her ice water'. Movement and its positive affect on both characters are central to this writer's story.

This writer does a terrific job of capturing her dad's feelings in her drawings, which she then describes using words.

Can I tell you...teaching writing to first graders is powerful! Their minds are open and free and welcoming. As I work with these students, I am humbled by their trust. Any words I say to them must be strong and positive and full of hope...because that is the only way to retain their trust. The only way to build their belief in themselves as writers. The only way to help them build a relationship between themselves and their stories.

In first grade this week, we are implementing the second of four lessons in preparation for a Graphic Narrative Unit of Study that I will be teaching next February. I am writing these introductory lessons as well as the unit of study for writing - and I could not be more excited!!!

We are asking first grade students to chronicle four stories from their lives from a very specific perspective - how does the way you physically move influence the way you feel emotionally about yourself and how does it positively affect those around you? We are trying to connect the choices we make that positively change our own world in our own ways, to the choices and motivations of our nation's founders and historical leaders, especially when faced with problems and troubles. In February, from these four seeds, the first graders will compose a personal story of growth, written in graphic narrative mode. And then, they will write the story of one of our Founding Fathers in the same graphic mode. This is a yearlong cross-curricular project at our school, integrating the arts with the core academic subjects of reading, writing, history, and science.

I promise to share more of this unit as we proceed. Honestly, this is uncharted territory for us and while I want to invite you all to write with us, the team and I have more thinking, planning, and writing to do first.

Next week, we are heading into a nonfiction unit of study. Informational writing fits into our district's instructional pacing for first grade in the second quarter, and this unit will take us right up to Thanksgiving. The first time I taught this unit several years ago, the writers had free choice for the subject content of their books. I taught the text features and we read nonfiction mentor texts; but, ultimately, the students chose the topic for their books.

This time, I plan to do things a little differently. I talked to the first grade teacher with whom I will be collaborating, and asked her what subject matter the students would be exploring during the time of our unit. She noted that the students would be working on seasons in science...BINGO!!

The teacher and I are going to ask the students to choose one of the four seasons as the subject of their nonfiction books. We will take a few days for the students to do some prewriting - researching and taking notes on various aspects of their seasons. And then will we begin the instruction on writing practical nonfiction.

I have chosen six books in which the authors have presented information in interesting ways.

   *Bat Loves the Night, Nicola Davies - a narrative story with facts included on the pages.
   *Atlantic, G. Brian Karas - giving the inanimate subject a voice; a fact page at the end.
   *Supermarket, Kathleen Krull - information presented as text on the illustrations.
   *What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? Steven Jenkins and Robin Page- questions to engage the reader on one page, answers on the next; written like a riddle.
   *I Call It Sky, Will C. Howell - repeating structure; poetic (but not necessarily
   rhyming)
*What's Up, What's Down?, Lola M. Schaefer - perspective of content, perspective
   of text on the page.

Student writers will be encouraged to try some of the same nonfiction text craft moves used in these books. With the content (seasons) already decided and researched, the students will be able to concentrate on how to present the information to the reader in interesting and engaging ways.

I am looking forward to getting into the first grade classrooms and getting busy. I'll keep you posted!!

#allkidscanwrite

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Assessment vs. The Heart of a Writer

11/1/2015

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It's assessment time.

Ugh.

And I say, "Ugh" only because the guidelines for assessing writers who don't yet use letters and words is so nebulous and unintuitive. These hard-working writers are composing narratives, make no mistake. And their classroom teacher and I have watched them as they have developed their stories. For their first quarter writing assessment, she sat with every writer and listened to each one dictate with consistency and detail the story captured on the paper.

Where I teach, the state standard for kindergarten writing reads:

The student will "draw pictures and/or use letters and phonetically spelled words to write about experiences."

The Department of Education goes on to specify in the Teacher Notes, "beginning writings may include drawings, letter strings, scribbles, letter approximations, and other graphic representations, as well as phonetically spelled words."

Importantly, the essential understanding of the standard is that kindergartners "understand that their writing serves a variety of purposes."

These kindergartners do understand! The get it!

So, that brings us back to assessment. While our district does adjust the score expectation for first quarter kindergarten writing, the students are still marked down for not including any letters, scribble-writing, or phonetically spelled words. Just because they don't know or use them yet. This bothers me when our writers are writing such rich, detailed compositions using drawings. Stories that they can read to us with consistency across days and even weeks. I believe that ability meets the criteria for having written a story. The story resides within the storyteller. If she or he can represent the narrative on paper with drawings and/or letters and words, that is writing!

And even as we adhere to district requirements for scoring, we know in our hearts, and we say to these kindergartners every single day - You Are Writers!!!

We watch each writer read his or her story, and we see and hear:

   *beginning, middle, end
   *the writing is about something
   *there is an idea and it is organized
   *Voice. Voice. Voice.

Please do not forget - this is Kindergarten. In October. Wow!!

Notice in this writer's piece, there are three scenes. In the first, she is at the "apple mountain" with her mom and sister. Next, she "got lots of apples", and then "we went home." She has included details including a tree full of apples, she and her family putting apples in a basket, and their multi-story house at the end.

I would give this writer strong scores for idea and organization and voice. Although we will not be able to give her a strong score on word choice. Since she doesn't use many words. And she will get the lowest score for sentence fluency. Since she doesn't yet write sentences.

Ugh. Again.

This writer's piece is all about going to the store with his mom. The first scene is him "holding the cart" and his mom "getting some peanuts". Next, he has "left the store". At the end, at home, he "went in the door and...went in my room so I could eat all my food."

This writer has written about a single idea. He has added details (shopping cart, peanuts). His story is organized with a beginning, middle, and end. Using the word peanuts and the phrase so I could eat them all in my room show voice.

But...no word choice, no sentence fluency, no usage and mechanics. There are no words. Just a lovely story told through drawing and dictation.

I know that at the end of the day, a first quarter writing assessment score will be followed by so many future scores and grades that it will never, not now or ever, define this writer.

Nor any of them.

Maybe that's what I've been trying to say all along. While we do have to administer state and district assessments, with required rubrics and standard expectations, we know in our teachers' hearts that our student writers are more. So. Much. More.

If we look into our writers' drawings and listen to their spoken words, we know the truth.

#allkidscanwrite

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