Growing Writers

An Innovative Writing Curriculum

An Innovative Writing Curriculum

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Frontload your writing year

November 19, 2017 by sallyberg

A second grade class writes animal reports in the fall.  As kids start to write the teacher sees lots of run-on sentences, misuse of apostrophes,  and misspellings of common words.  This is getting in the way of looking at the content of the writing.  If you were this teacher, what would you do?

You could stop everyone and do a big lesson on run-on sentences and apostrophes, which you probably weren’t planning on, and don’t have the time for. The risk here is having a lot of kids on cognitive overload as you cram them with new information.

You could decide to modify the project and give everyone fill-in-the-blanks worksheets on their animal so they don’t have to write so much.  This would help, but it would lower the level of writing practice and diminish the experience of real writing.

You could do a week of editing.  Since second graders don’t yet see all their own writing mistakes or those of others, this means a lot of work on the teacher’s end.  Do you have a couple of hours to spare?  OK, great!  But just keep in mind that even when students fix mistakes, it doesn’t mean they have learned strategies and rules for preventing them.

Or, maybe you just decide to let let all the mistakes go because, after all, they are only second graders.  I know that none of my readers would choose this option, because you always have a high standard for success!

Well, how about preventing this whole problem?

How?  By frontloading all the skills you know will be needed.  Work on sentence writing skills and punctuation skills for a few months and get your class excited with the knowledge that they are building up to some big writing projects.  When sentences have been mastered, do lots of practice with writing good paragraphs and adding details.  Practice things like neat handwriting, writing to the end of the line before starting a new line, and spacing.

Each grade level has skills that should be frontloaded during the first half of the year.  If you are teaching kindergarten, handwriting and basic drawing should be priorities before doing other writing projects.  For first grade, handwriting, sound spelling, spacing, and some writing stamina should be firmly in place before giving important assignments.

For those of you using Growing Writers, this means focus on Growing Writers for the first half of the year!  Spend all the writing time you have on it, 3-5 days a week.  First graders should ideally be finishing Book 4 by the end of January, because these are the basic writing skills that will enable them to do class writing projects in reading, science, and social studies.  These four books cover all the letters for handwriting.  If you are still on Book 4 in March or April, it means that handwriting is still being introduced very late in the year.

For second grade, Book 1, the Lists activity, and Book 2 should ideally be completed by mid-January.  This work, done thoroughly, will set the tone and the standard for all the writing done for the rest of the year.

Kindergartners should ideally be done with Books 1 and 2 by Winter Break, giving them a good start on fine motor control and handwriting.

Here’s an example. 

When I taught first grade, I finished Book 4 by the end of January.  We always took a field trip to the local Children’s Museum in early February.  On our return that day, I would give students a piece of paper with lines (we called it hat-belt-foot lines) and simply say “Write words about what you liked about the Hands-On Museum.” Up until this time they had only written in their Growing Writers workbooks, where pictures were always allowed after a few lines of writing.  This was a whole blank page!  At first I would get some looks like, “Are you kidding me???”  And then, magic.  Every student, even the lowest performers, wrote about the field trip with perfect handwriting, spacing, and fairly understandable sound spelling.  I didn’t expect punctuation because I hadn’t taught that skill, but every skill I had taught was there.  What a proud bunch of kids I had as they handed in their work.  If we had chosen to edit and do a final draft, the editing would have been on spelling and punctuation – fairly easy for the amount they wrote.  You can see some examples of these on this website under Results.  

If you started late in the year, or haven’t prioritized teaching basic writing skills, resolve to start earlier next year and prioritize skills over projects.  You will be amazed at how easy every other writing assignment becomes later on.

Frontload skills, frontload skills, frontload skills. 

You will have a more successful classroom. Guaranteed.

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No more “Do your best”

October 22, 2017 by sallyberg

Yes, you are hearing me correctly.

Don’t tell children to “do their best”.

There are three reasons why teachers say this (that I can think of), and two of the reasons aren’t good.  The not-good reasons are…

  1. We know that what we’re asking is a little beyond what many can actually do with confidence.
  2. The assignment  has no clear criteria for success.

Let’s think about the first reason.

We are usually uttering those words, “Do your best!”, with hope in our voices, when we send children off to work independently.  The question is, are they going off to complete work that they have seen repeatedly modeled?  Have they had lots of exposure to this kind of assignment?  Have they had plenty of guided practice?  Do they have all of the preliminary skills needed to do a good job?

Something I remember from Anita Archer’s training last summer is that it’s not “I do it, we do it, you do it.”  It’s “I do it, we do it, we do it, we do it, we do it, you do it.”  Guided practice is where the learning really sinks in.  We often think kids are ready for independent work when they are not.  

Instead of “Do your best”, you will be saying, “Your work should look like the examples we have done together over the last few days.”  If you have taught it well, there will be no confusion, no hands in the air, no sense of impending failure.

Now, for the second not-good reason, which is, not holding students to a high standard.

When you say, “Do your best”, who gets to decide what the best is?  Yup, you have just given complete power to the student to set the standard for success.  This isn’t exactly setting children up for success in real life.  

An example of this is how handwriting is traditionally taught.  Children are taught to make a row of letters, told to “try your best”, and then circle the best letter.  The result looks something like this:

I’m reading this 6-year-old’s mind:   “My teacher wants me to make a lot of letters, but she’ll accept anything as long as I have one good one in each row.  I don’t really feel like working that hard right now so I’ll just say I did my best.”

Here’s an example of a child who knows there is success criteria:

Here’s what’s going on in her mind: “I know my teacher is going to look carefully at my work and I’ll have to re-do anything messy.  I think I’ll just do it right so I don’t have to erase and start over.”

Which student is going to get the most out of the lesson?  And, the other interesting thing is, the first sweet teacher who was being so nice but not making her students work as hard, reported to me that her students were bored with handwriting.  If the game is too easy to win, it gets boring.  Up the ante, expect more and better, have higher standards, and children will find anything a fun challenge.

Are you wondering what my third – and good – reason is for saying “Do your best”?

Sometimes I give a pre-assessment to find out how much my class knows before I begin teaching a skill or topic.  In this case, I explain to students that I know there will be some things on the assessment that they will not know, but I’m getting information on what I need to teach them.  I say, “Do your best so I can see what I need to teach.”

Let me know if any of this is helpful to you.  Or if you can think of any other reasons why teachers use this famous phrase!

 

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What is explicit instruction?

November 5, 2016 by sallyberg

The terms explicit instruction and direct instruction get tossed around a lot.  I’m not going to get into the true meaning of direct instruction, which gets complicated (there’s “direct instruction” and Direct Instruction) Another whole blog’s worth of explanation, so I’ll just stick with explicit.

Sometimes the folks in our field use the term explicit instruction to mean that they routinely get the whole class together and explain difficult concepts, as opposed to having students work independently most of the time.  Maybe they even teach all day like this in a lecture format with some questions and answers.

Merriam Webster defines explicit as:

fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity :  leaving no question as to meaning or intent <explicit instructions>

Yes, there’s a second definition of explicit having more to do with magazines and movies, which I’m definitely not referring to here.

What I’m really interested in is what Anita Archer and Charles Hughes describe in detail in their book called Explicit Instruction.  They discuss 16 elements of instruction which I believe constitute a very effective form of teaching, especially when students are learning new skills.  It’s the kind of instruction that is provided in Growing Writers in each lesson.

ELEMENTS OF EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION

Element 1:    Focus on critical content

Element 2:    Sequence skills logically

Element 3:    Break down complex skills and strategies into smaller instructional units

Element 4:    Design organized and focused lessons

Element 5:    Begin each lesson with a clear statement of the lesson’s goals

Element 6:    Review prior skills and knowledge before beginning instruction

Element 7:    Provide step-by-step demonstrations

Element 8:    Use clear and concise language

Element 9:    Provide an adequate range of examples and non-examples

Element 10:  Provide guided and supported practice

Element 11:  Require frequent responses

Element 12:  Monitor student performance closely

Element 13:  Provide immediate affirmative and corrective feedback

Element 14:  Deliver the lesson at a brisk pace

Element 15:  Help students organize knowledge

Element 16:  Provide distributed and cumulative practice

As you can see, it has little to do with lectures or mini-lessons and is a whole approach to teaching.  It sounds dry as you read this list, but believe me, you can inject a whole lot of fun and creativity into this.

You can check into this more here or just try out Growing Writers to see how it works in action!

 

 

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Are you using McGraw-Hill Wonders for reading and writing?

May 29, 2016 by sallyberg

Our district purchased Wonders several years ago and I like the reading materials a lot for second grade. However, I sincerely Wonder if anyone piloted the writing lessons for K-2 with actual children.  Here is a link to a paper I wrote for our district adoption committee comparing how Wonders writing stacks up with the effective practices of explicit instruction.  They were about to adopt it when I wrote this, so it had no effect.  However, as I predicted, teachers have been frustrated with this part of the program.

Critique of Wonders writing for grade 1

 

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