Chapter 5 - Literacy

This weeks reading on writers workshop was EXTREMELY helpful for me in my placement. The students have about 45 minutes work of writing and about 45 minutes of reading during our literacy block. This is basically 45 minutes of reading and writing workshops and I have been very lost as to what I needed to be doing during the writing workshop. With the reading workshop, I have just been watching my teacher during her reading groups and then reading with a few of the students that are not doing their reading group. When it came to the writing portion though, I was not sure how to answer questions that the students were asking and how much grammar I should be correcting or how much content I should be addressing and where the story became mine instead of the students because of all of the “corrections” I was making for the students. This chapter really answered a lot of questions that I had and now, hopefully, I can become more comfortable during writing workshop and not just walking around watching the students write their stories.

There was also a section on sharing the student’s work which I LOVE! There is one girl in particular in my class that has some behavioral problems and it has become increasingly more difficult to deal with her during writing and reading workshop because she becomes very bored with what is going on and she acts out, disrupting the students around her. However, she has this amazing story that if she could put more detail in, it would easily be one of the most interesting and well written stories in the class. The big problem with her is that she thinks she is dumb. She regularly says “I don’t know, I’m dumb” and then laughs about it and goes back to her disruptive ways. Her classroom teacher had not had a chance to read her story and after school was out, I told her about the story and we both read over it from her writing journal. The next day, she was asked to read her story out loud to the classroom during sharing time. After each student shares their story, the class is to offer three good comments and three good critiques on how to make the story better for the student. I was told that after she shared her story, she got glowing comments about the story from her classmates and by the next time I was in the classroom, she had published her first story and was eagerly working on her second story. She REALLY wanted to share the story both with me and then again with her classmates. I really think that allowing the students a chance to share their work is a great way to encourage the students in addition to having the students help one another with their writing.