Deidra M. Gammill-Learning the Write Way

This article was about an approach to writing to use across curriculums called writing to learn. The article distinguishes between writing to communicate and writing to learn, writing to learn is described as : “students use language to shape, order, and represent their own experience to reach fuller understanding (Fulwiler and Young, 1982). The idea is that students can learn by writing as opposed to the view that writing takes a long time and just takes away from instructional time. It helps students to think critically, self question and use prior knowledge as they take ownership of their writing and learning.

I can see how this can fit into the first grade curriculum of my classroom in language arts as well as in other areas mainly math. I can see this working later in the year, right now most first graders have a very hard time writing and some are still learning letters, so they may have the ideas in their head but they are not able to write them. There are others though whose writing is amazing and they are shy and I can see where they would rather write in a journal instead of participating in a group discussion. One part of the article compared a group that wrote in math journals versus those who participated in discussion and there was no significant difference in their gains, so that shows that using language this way in general is beneficial. I really like the idea of using a K-W-L plus chart and I think that is something I could do for my unit. As a class they have filled out concept maps but the teacher is writing the comments from the students on the board but that is something they could copy and put in their journals to reference later and add to.

I would like to see other examples and examples from first grade if I were to use this in my classroom. I would also need to look into our curriculum and see where I could incorporate it, it may be easy to just do a K-W-L chart rather than the concept map the curriculum is using and I like how the KWL chart makes more connections to what they want to learn rather than the concept maps we have been using are just very straightforward what do they know. KWL would also give a better idea of what students are interested in learning about and possibly ways to connect it to science or social studies. Overall I would need to do some more reading on this approach.

Since we are using a new literacy program I am spending the next couple weeks observing the kids and how they are reacting and interacting with the material. I will need to continue taking notes on the students in regards to the different sections of the literacy block. We have completed various beginning of the year formal assessments and have grouped the kids in 3 different reading levels. We also used informal assessments and writing portfolios for some students who according to their computer testing tested very low but in reality they are in the advanced group. It was just more confirmation on how one cannot simply go by standardized testing, and for this particular student it was an English as a second language issue.