Ch. 6- Capitalize on the Reading-Writing Connection
I always remember hearing that students who write well are usually good readers and students who read well are often good writers. This chapter enforces that same concept. Reading and writing are closely connected and tend to support each other. Using shared writing experiences and the resulted text from those experiences as part of your guided reading instruction is a great way to make the connection between reading and writing more personal for all students.
I’d really like to work on integrating shared writing experiences into my instruction more often. I’d also like to be able to use them with my reading instruction as well, but I’m concerned with when and how I will do that. My district uses a text book series as a basis for reading instruction and we rarely steer away from the series to do other types of reading instruction. Of course we adjust our lessons to meet the needs of our students and to meet standards and goals, but we usually stick to the text book. Most alternatives to the text books that we use include explicit teaches to prepare for assessments (talking about using context clues, text features, synonyms, antonyms, etc.), core lit books, or Scholastic News magazines. I think that maybe if I talk to my colleagues about the possibility of integrating reading and writing instruction with shared writing experiences, this could become an option for one of our alternative forms of instruction, but I can’t see it becoming a daily thing that we do all year.
An important thing that I learned from this chapter is that we should never deprive students of their free-choice independent reading time. I feel like I really need to work on my time management to ensure that students get this time more often. I have DEAR (drop everything and read) time planned for each day, but I often tend to brush that time aside if I find myself running behind or having to spend more time working on another subject. This past year I felt like my students only got their DEAR time if we got through everything else. It turned into more of an “extra” or “free” time, rather than an important time to have each day. Regie Routman explained in this chapter that voluntary reading develops competence.
Composing text and comprehending text are related, so Regie recommends writing in the content areas. In other words, if I have my students write about caterpillars and butterflies in science, or about government in social studies, they are more likely to remember the information they wrote. Sometimes teachers and students tend to focus a lot on fictional writing, but expository writing is just as important. It is also important to have non-fiction books in your classroom library to link that reading and writing connection in the classroom.
A large part of this chapter talked about summary writing. I think that a lot of times as teachers we ask our students to write a summary, or to summarize a story and they really have no idea what that means or what it should look like. I know that as a grade level this past year, our students really struggled on answering re-telling and summarizing questions on the state assessment. I believe this was our lowest indicator. Regie Routman recommends teaching summary writing to your students through modeling, shared demonstration, and guided practice. She also says that sometimes oral summaries, retelling, and shared writing experiences are easier ways to practice summaries in grades K-3.
Next school year I’d like to really like to focus on modeling and teaching summarizing and retelling to my students. I’m going to try to do this with a read-aloud or picture book that my students become familiar with. Regie recommends reading a few pages aloud, then thinking aloud and summarizing those few pages for the students. Once this is modeled, I could have the students help me with the next few pages. They could talk amongst each other to get ideas to add to the summary, and then they could help me complete the rest. Once my students become more familiar with this concept through demonstration and guided practice, we could come up with a list of important parts of a summary. Then I could give them some smaller texts to summarize or retell with a partner or in groups and we could share our summaries and discuss their important components.
Something I’ve been doing already that was mentioned in this chapter is having students respond to reading through writing. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t have students write more than what they’ve read, but that connecting to the text through writing is important for comprehension and test preparation. Regie Routman recommends responding to text through writing daily. A lot of times my students respond to text by answering QAR questions or vocabulary questions, but I’d like to add more open-ended questions for students to respond to in a writing journal.
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