Teach Writing Right

It may appear that I'm slacking off of my "Keep a Blog as my New Year's Resolution," but I really haven't been.  Honest.

 The NNWP has me on a tight deadline for having our newest 300+ page print resource to the editor this month so it can go to the printer in early March.  The Guide--"Show Me Your Story"--focuses on narrative lessons and teaching strategies, especially aimed at 3rd-5th grade.  The fourth grade section is now completely done!  Woo-hoo!  Coming soon (to the editor) the 3rd and 5th grade section.  This is what I have been working on.  See?  Not slacking!

Let me share from the now-completed fourth-grade section for the new guide.  Here's a link to one of the pre-writing lessons that will appear both online and in the guide:  http://writingfix.com/Process/PreWriting/Showing_Pride_4th.htm

This is a pre-writing lesson that teaches skills necessary to narrative writing.  It focuses nicely on three of my seven elements of a differentiated writing lesson: graphic organizers, student talk about student samples, and  student choice.

Take a few minutes to explore for those three elements in the thorough online write-up.  Did any new ideas occur to you?

I'm working hard on creating some final lessons to be featured in the NNWP's new print resource: Promoting Deeper Student Thinking while Teaching Narrative Writing.  The guide will be finished this month so that it can go to both the editor and to print in March.

Many of the materials in the guide are oriented towards our Nevada fourth and fifth graders, since fifth grade is when our students are tested on narrative writing.  One of my issues with our state test is that it provides very little time for students to do proper pre-writing, which leads to very basic rough drafts being written; add to that the fact that most of our teachers don't prepare students to revise authentically, so when the students are given a short amount of time on the test to revise, they really do little more than add a few descriptions and write their rough drafts neater.  What gets submitted to our state test for scoring is more-often-than-not polished rough draft writing.  A polished rough draft--on its best day--barely passes the writing test.

Our new guide really focuses on teaching students to practice pre-writing and revision strategies well as they write to state-test-like prompts.  If students are well-practiced at genuine pre-writing and authentic revision, they will write better samples, even if they're given a limited amount of time to do these two tasks on the actual test.

And so...I did a demo lesson last week that focused on pre-writing for one of our fourth grade practice prompts; this lesson will be featured in the new guide.  Before I even came to work with the students for the two days I was scheduled, I sent them two videos, which forewarned them of the topic they'd be writing to, and asked them to start doing some thinking that would help them fill out the graphic organizer I'd be presenting them with.  Here is the second video I sent them to watch on their classroom's Smartboard.

Click here to see the whole video I sent the kids.

The writer's notebook page that I show in the video looks exactly like the graphic organizer I handed them as soon as I entered the class.  I couldn't believe how many of them were "raring to go" because they had watched both videos.  The graphic organizer was filled out very well and quickly, and that led to much better rough drafts from those kids.  I pick up their revised drafts this Friday, and I plan to post some of them here at the blog.

Here is the lesson on-line, where you can access the graphic organizer and other materials I used to with the students.

--Corbett

This post is focused one one of the Seven Elements of a Differentiated Writing Lesson Workshop: graphic organizers.  I am sitting here at Suburu, enjoying their new WiFi, while I await a new battery for my car.

There are a lot of books being sold to teachers that feature a variety of black-lined masters of generic graphic organizers.  I used to own books like these, but I gave them all away as I became a more seasoned teacher of writing.  Pictured, at left, is one of them.

A one-size-fits-all, generic graphic organizer is a good tool, but it's not a great tool.  I have come to believe that graphic organizers need to be very specific to the lesson at hand.  At WritingFix, with all new lessons that are posted, we ask the submitting teacher to provide a lesson-specific graphic organizer, and they have been getting better at designing them with all the examples now posted at the various lessons.  I actually teach a pretty fun 90-minute workshop that shows teachers how to use the table-making tools in Microsoft Word to design great graphic organizers like this one.  Now that's lesson specific!

This year, we opened up the invitation to WritingFix users to take note of the graphic organizers we've provided for the lessons, but to adapt them before actually teaching the lesson.  After all, how do we become great writing teachers?  By recklessly borrowing big ideas from others' lessons and adapting them with our own ideas--the ones we know will work better with our current group of learners.

Those books they sell us with generic graphic organizers don't encourage this type of adaptation.  I wish they did.  I know for a fact that I learned to make really good graphic organizers by adapting ones from lessons I borrowed from colleagues.

So...the reason for this post is actually this: I am very excited to announce that another teacher has adapted a graphic organizer from WritingFix, and then she has shared her adaptation with us, which is totally cool in my opinion.  Someday, I envision WritingFix being a storehouse of original lessons with lots of other teachers' original adaptations included at those lessons.

Here is the graphic organizer adaptation that got shared and posted this weekend.  Thanks, Kerry!

Here is the original lesson that inspired the adapted graphic organizer!

I hope more teacher-users of WritingFix start sharing their adaptations.  Yes, that was an invitation from me to get out there and continuing to "borrow recklessly" while giving back at the same time.

--Corbett