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Standard 3c. Uses student developmental needs, background, and interests in planning for instruction. Standard 4c. Demonstrates flexibility and responsiveness in adjusting instruction to meet student needs. Standard 7c. Applies research, knowledge, and skills from professional development opportunities to improve practice.
Justification: This was a journal entry for an online class about developing young students into writers that I participated in. Through the process of detailing the things I see my students do and then reflecting on them, I am better able to meet the needs of my students.
Double Entry Journal: Writing Process of Faith, age 5 9-3-05 Faith begins her writing time as instructed, finding a place to work, bringing her crayons and a pencil with her to the floor. She draws her line across the middle of the page, adding today’s date at the top. She begins work on her picture. Using a pencil she draws two girls holding hands with a rainbow above them. Switching to her crayons, she colors it all in. After the picture is to her liking she begins to write, using the pencil. She begins to write a string of letters, with no spaces. It goes straight across the page, for the most part. It takes her several minutes to get 5-7 letters recorded and then she wanders off to our front board. After a few minutes, she returns, and takes her book back to the front board. She comes back to her table after about 2 minutes and tells me she is done.
I sit beside her, watching as she purposefully begins her work. What do you do first? I ask. She informs me that you always draw the line first, so that you know where the picture goes and where the letters go. This makes me think that maybe I ‘ve been a bit to rigid about the line thing…sometimes authors use writing inside the picture. That could be a mini lesson for another day. As she draws the picture, I am struck by how hard she works on the details…her friend Rachel is in the picture, I can tell without asking just by seeing the golden ringlets of hair. Faith even looks across the table several times to make sure she is getting it drawn right! As she begins writing, I immediately sense she is just writing a random string of letters, but I ask her to tell me her story anyway. She tells me that her story says I like to play with my friend Rachel. As she tells me this she runs her finger under the string of letters and I notice that she has gotten several of the beginning sounds of words recorded correctly. I ask her to read it again to me slowly using the finger like she did last time. She starts with the word I. I ask her how she knew what to write. She tells me it is just the word I like in our chart I like. She continues to read/touch the words. She has the word like represented by the letters LK, my by the letter M, and friend with an F. For Rachel’s name she visited our front board where all our classmates’ names are recorded and copied it, although not correctly. She tells me she knew where to find Rachel’s name because that is where all our names are. She doesn’t end with any sort of punctuation, nor does she follow the conventions of capital / lower case lettering. I tell her how proud I am of the words she remembered, plus how she knew just where to go to find the words she needed. She gives me a smile and goes off to find Rachel to share the story. In my reflection of this, I find that I am impressed with her confidence as a writer. Although I am not able to fully implement Katie Rays ideas for writer’s workshop yet, my students are becoming successful in their own writing attempts. I see how my adherence to the setup of my writing time has possibly limited the ways in which my student’s write, so perhaps I should branch out with some mini-lessons on the ways text can be structured. Food for thought:
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