As the K-1's come together as a community of readers, we're also coming together as a community of writers. Writing happens every day - formally during writing workshop, writing the morning message, writing notes and letters to friends and family, labeling drawings, and during shared and interactive writing.
The children are learning that writing has many purposes. It's more than a collection of words on a page - writing is about constructing good stories and sharing important ideas. Children may begin by drawing a picture and labeling their pictures with a few words. Then we'll encourage children to say more about what they've drawn and add on to the picture. Soon we'll help them say enough that they need to start a new page, next they'll start a new chapter, and next a new volume. And, so it goes......
Even if some of the children are simply writing a few words to accompany drawings, they're learning about story structure and language, about how books go from front to back, and top to bottom. This process of writing is helping children to become better and stronger readers. As children work to construct and write the "morning message" for their classmates, they understand their words have importance - they're not only sharing a message with their class, they're also learning about spelling, punctuation, and relying on strategies for writing we have been practicing since September.
During our writing workshop, the children are completely immersed in work with sound-letter correspondences. As they work in their green "frog books" (our preferred name for our writing notebooks) constructing stories, children learn to stretch out words, isolate chunks of sounds, relate the sounds in one word to the sounds in another word, and search their memories, the alphabet chart, and the word wall to match sounds with letters. Once they've encoded a chunk of sounds into print, they reread what they've written and continue supplying more of the needed letters. The writing workshop could almost be retitled "The Phonics Workshop" except that, of course, so much else is being accomplished as well.
We know children learn language best when using it for real purposes. We know that words are easier to read when they occur in a story than in a list. Our approach is to let children learn words as they encounter them in texts that are funny or sad or otherwise, memorable. I highly doubt you'll find any child who says, "Wow, that list of spelling words for my spelling test was fascinating!" But, you will find a child who may struggle with an unknown word while reading about the adventures of Jack and Annie in the
Magic Treehouse series, or while laughing along with Frog and Toad, and the next week use that very word in his or her writing. This is exactly the type of meaningful learning we strive for in both reading and writing workshop.
We want school to say to children, "Welcome. Come in. You can feel at home here. Bring your life and your stories and your ideas and energy - we are going to have a blast here, exploring all sorts of amazing things together. One of the greatest things we'll explore here are letters and words." I want letters and words to be a cause for our celebration, exploration, invention, talk, and laughter, and I want letters and words to be all about community. We are involved in this process together, helping one another to sound out a word, or to spell a tricky word while writing. Children need opportunities to construct their own understandings of sound-letter correspondences and of spelling patterns. What better way to do this than write about what's important to us, to share our stories, and gather together around a shared exploration of print?
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| Responding to a note |
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| Writing for fun |
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| Writing the morning message |
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| Writing in our "frog books" |
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| Writing with our grandparents on Special Friends day |
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| Writing with our families |
Here is more food for thought as we continue the debate about handwriting instruction. What really matters is giving students time to participate in real writing each day - something Parker students are fortunate enough to do.
