Ch. 2: Start with Celebration
This chapter explained the importance of really celebrating writing and being positive with your students about their efforts. It also talked about the importance of sharing your own personal writing with students to encourage them, bond with them, and show how you think as a writer throughout the process. Students need to share their own writing with each other as well. Allowing students to share their work and praising them for their efforts will help them become more motivated writers.
Regie Routman mentions that a problem in writing instruction these days is that students are often writing to please a teacher or meet the grade, rather than for enjoyment. This causes students to become what she calls “avoidance writers”. They write only when they have to and not when they want to on their own time. I know that I do not want to create avoidance writers in my classroom. I want writing to be a fun time for students to express their ideas without being afraid. I also want my students to feel comfortable taking risks in the classroom and sharing their personal experiences. As a teacher I try to be very positive with students on a daily basis. Although I do find myself looking for mistakes in writing at times, I also try very hard to point out the good things that students are doing. After reading this chapter I’ve found that I could possibly do that even more than I am now.
After reading chapter two I realized that stories should really be a backbone in the writing curriculum. Regie recommends starting with stories to engage students, relate to them, and to develop a bonding and trust among them. Reading stories to students and telling your own students can really help them become better listeners and writers. According to Regie Routman, stories teach and develop things like language and vocabulary, imagination, comprehension, sequencing/structure awareness, and understanding of how writers work. I feel like I do this during my read-aloud time that I have each day with students. I also tell stories during class at more informal parts of the day, but I feel like I can do a better job of carrying those stories into my writing instruction. According to Regie Routman, the stories I tell to my students can really help them improve in many areas of the language arts. Especially if I turn my stories into written drafts and think-aloud while writing them among my students.
Regie Routman recommends daily, regular journal writing time for students to write about what really matters to them. I feel like I should incorporate this time into my daily schedule much more frequently. One problem that I’ve had with free-writing time in my own classroom is that those students who have trouble deciding what to write about and who cannot think of ideas seem to give up and start talking to others or getting off-task. I’d really like to know how to manage a free-write time to ensure that all students are on-task and if not writing, are at least thinking about what they’d like to write about. I know that some of my students would really enjoy this as I even had a few of them ask me this year “why don’t we have very much time to just write whatever we want?”. That was a big wake-up call, and after reading this chapter I realize how important that time can really be to kids.
There are some interesting guidelines that are recommended in Regie Routman’s book when it comes to telling stories and writing stories for our students. One thing that really hit home with me was the fact that we should only write as much as we expect of our students. I feel that I am very guilty of writing long stories to share with my students. I’m sure this can be very overwhelming for them as they probably feel that they are expected to write as much as I do! After sharing my writing I often find myself saying, “of course you do not have to write as much as I have written here”. What is the point then? Why am I writing that much as an example for them if I don’t expect them to do the same? I think that I need to be more conscious of how I am demonstrating writing to my students.
Another key point that I learned from this chapter is that we should always write in front of our students. There are so many times that I have spent writing a story after school and editing it and revising it so I could read it and show it to my students the next day as an example. I have been missing the entire purpose of writing instruction! When I just show the kids what I have written and read it to them, they are not observing the whole writing process that I went through the night before! I need to think about the topic I may share with them, and then think-aloud as I make all of my writing decisions right there in the classroom in front of and with my students. I’ve learned that this is a very important part of writing instruction- showing the students how writers think and what they do when they are in the process of creating a piece of writing.
I was very interested to read that sometimes students who write at home tend to write much better than they do when they are at school. Even their handwriting at home is often superior to their handwriting at school. This is because students who write at home often write for enjoyment and for their own purposes. They get to choose what to write about and write the way they want. This is something we need to keep in mind when we teach writing in our own classrooms. We need to be sure that students are given their choice of topics or at least some kind of choice within a broader topic. When kids have the opportunity to write about something that means a lot to them, writing seems less like a job or assignment that they have to do and more like a fun activity that they get to do.
Image can be found at- http://artfiles.art.com/5/p/LRG/15/1576/NQMDD00Z/charles-schulz-peanuts-celebrate-the-little-things.jpg
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