writing Search Results

How Dialogue Journals Build Teacher-Student Relationships

…students.” Writing Fluency: When students write in dialogue journals, there’s no pressure to fulfill an assignment or construct perfect sentences. Students just write. And the more a person writes, the more confident they become and the better their writing gets. If the teacher can identify topics that are important to the student, this can inspire far more writing than a student would ever produce for an assignment. Nick, the student above who wrote about Derek Jeter, initially told Galarza he hated to write. After their first exchange about the Yankees, Galarza says the topic stayed with them for the rest…

Fire Up Your Students with a Campaign Project

…checking in on what they were doing, giving encouragement, asking questions to redirect learning, and supporting with writing models where necessary. I paused by one pair of students who were writing a speech. They were using an anchor chart to prompt ideas and had already integrated some good speech writing techniques into their writing. “What’s the rule of 3’s?” I asked. They explained that you repeat a phrase three times at the start of three sentences in a row to add emphasis. They showed me their example; I was so impressed. Anchor charts help students apply genre-specific strategies to their…

Episode 171: Does Your School Need a Literacy Check-Up?

…there’s a checklist of items that are focused on writing process and writing modeling and demonstration. That is the same all the way up in the tools through grade 12 for writing. But the difference on the elementary tool is that we’re also looking at handwriting and spelling instruction. So there are practices that are deemed more effective, and actually there’s a continuum that children move through with their handwriting and their uses of spelling and sound relationships from scribbling to things that look more like words. So anyway, this tool is trying to check where are they? What are…

Delaying the Grade: How to Get Students to Read Feedback

…long your terms might be) Thanks Geoff Lauren Jackson I have been using a similar process to yours for several years and have really appreciated the difference it makes to student focus on their writing. One more step in the revision process that I find helpful is to ask students to include a brief one-paragraph reflection about how they made their writing stronger. This helps them think about the effectiveness of their changes and also helps me understand what their goals were for the revision. Sometimes students are interested in working on a particular aspect of their writing, and it…

Episode 160: Fire Up Your Students with a Campaign Project

…to present it to each other. Actually, as we go along, we stop and share bits of our writing. They’re all exposed to a whole range of ways of writing. So I think they’re getting a lot of breadth from that, from just one theme. I think that’s another big advantage. GONZALEZ: Yeah, and that’s ultimately what this is. It is a writing unit, it’s just that it’s got a much clearer focus and a better real-world application. CURRELL: Yes, yeah. GONZALEZ: Yeah. So what our main goal today is to sort of teach people how they can do this…

Episode 175 Transcript

…that that would be part of the process. GONZALEZ: Yeah. FRIEDEN: So that, all of this stuff is happening more regularly in my class, and students are just understanding that this is the way writing happens. GONZALEZ: That’s great. So, is their actual writing getting better too? FRIEDEN: Yes. GONZALEZ: You’re getting better writing from them? FRIEDEN: Yeah, because I’m making them write a ton because we need a ton to work with here and then as they just, just going through the motions of processing their own writing and turning it into a second draft multiple times, just makes…

Episode 199 Transcript

…Apollo School in episode 62 — but something special is added when you call them seminars. That’s what today’s guest calls them. Melanie Meehan is a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers. She appeared on episode 192, where we talked about backward chaining, another differentiation strategy. While working on that piece, she also mentioned the seminar strategy, and I liked it so much I thought we should give it its own separate space. Today Meehan is going to talk with me about…

Episode 192 Transcript

…residential kids. So when my district’s writing and social studies position opened up about, I think, 11 years ago now, I jumped on it. And I have been doing that position ever since, and it’s led to writing books and writing blogs and here I am. So yeah, it’s just always, writing has always been my favorite thing to teach. GONZALEZ: And you, so you do that at, in your own specific work role, but then you also have some online stuff where you also help other writing teachers. So tell us about that. MEEHAN: Right. That’s part of the…

Does Your School Need a Literacy Check-Up?

…and fluent, legible handwriting. They need lots of opportunities to write in order to become both more competent and confident. Unfortunately, what I’m seeing in elementary classrooms is what Mike Schmoker has seen too—arts and crafts activities masquerading as writing instruction (see “The Crayola Curriculum” here). The tool below focuses on the writing process and specific, effective strategies (shared writing, interactive writing, mentor texts, etc.). It’s a succinct guide to help everyone remember and look for evidence of best practices. Click images to open larger view. Click here to make a copy of this tool for your Google Drive. Middle…