After reading chapter four, Help Children to Write and Keep Writing, and chapter 7, Conditions for Effective Writing, I found a lot of useful tips and things about teaching kids to write. Both chapters provide useful information that I have written down and plan to use someday in my classroom! Here is some things that I found especially useful from the chapters.
In the chapter, Help Children to Write and Keep Writing, the introduction said something to me that I strongly agree with. It said that teachers should write along side students. I think that demonstrating that you as the teacher have a love for writing is such great representation for students to see that writing is not just something you do in school and then forget about it. This chapter kind of splits up the tips by grades. It starts out with kindergarten and first grade. A few things that I really enjoyed when it discussed writing in kindergarten and first grade was that the teacher demonstrates by using pictures and then labeling the picture. The students help the teacher label by sounding out the words. This was something I just saw in my field on Thursday. The teacher was talking to the students about a memory that she had and was having the students label the picture with her on the board. I think that is a particularly good way to help students learn how to label their pictures that represent is shown. Another thing I liked that the chapter discussed was writers who want you to help them spell every word correctly. This happens a lot to me in field. The author suggested telling the student that they "will give them one because they don't have time to do them all." I could help my students do that too but sometimes I like to help my students with the decoding process because it helps them since they are still new to the phonemes. I also loved the idea about giving the student a short note that they could probably decode but if they cannot, they can ask a neighbor. Then for second to fifth grade, I liked the idea of teaching to students to listen to themselves as well as "receiving the text" which is listening and understanding classmates text.
In the chapter, Conditions for Effective Writing, I was shocked to read that students need to be writing for at least four days out of the school week and for 35-45 minutes. That is a lot of time. I liked that the author provided suggestions on how to find this time. One thing that I found was a particularly a good idea was having students do it first thing in the morning. I think that's a pretty good idea. The chapter also discussed how you need to represent choice, response, demonstration, room structure, and evaluation. A couple of the most important things I read was students need to hear from other students, not just the teacher. I think that's an important thing to note as a future teacher. I also liked the discussion on how it needs to be demonstrated. It gives a good example of how art teachers just don't tell students to draw without showing them so the same has to be done in writing. The author makes the point that during their first year, they did not do this. I think that this is important to note too.
Overall, both chapters had great tips for teaching writing in all grades. I liked the examples that it provided with dialogue as well as different ideas for how to incorporate the writing.
