While reading this chapter it reminded me of when Rick Shelton came to do an in-service workshop for the teachers at school. He advised that at the beginning of the year have students create an "EXPERT LIST." This list should include all of the experiences that on which students have personal knowledge. I like the suggestions in chapter 1 because they take these experiences and make students dig deeper and rank these experiences into a level. I am not sure about some of their level 3 ideas as I would see some of them being level 4. I am excited about implementing this idea at the beginning of the year for my students in the Fall.
What do you guys think about the ideas presented in chapter 1? Do you do anything like this already in your classroom? If so, how are your ideas similar? How are the different? I skimmed the book and could not find the web address for the resources, any luck?
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Deshondra-I too am looking forward to using some of the ideas in this chapter. No, I have not implemented this specific strategies. I see how they can be useful and to note, that catagorizing the list will assist students in being more in-depth with what they write.
ReplyDeleteI certainly experienced AHA moments regarding the levels of prompts. Now I understand why students did not write more exclusively.
The section that discusses Connecting life experiences with life truths can assist in building thinking skills and analytical skills-if gives me insights on how to help students understand life truths (applies to all of us) with their own personal experiences-modeling will assist in implementing this strategy...
About to read chapter 2
The idea I found most interesting was the "Bank" of memories. It is always a struggle to help students find their way out of cookie-cutter writing.
ReplyDeleteChapter 1 provided exactly what I wanted to know reguarding where to begin in August with my writers. Developing the various levels of personal experience will guide my students towards the quality of work they are to produce and help me to better teach writing.
ReplyDeleteModeling this concept and helping students create their own examples of levels along with the student chart for brainstorming "bank" experiences, these two documents could be used as student resources and kept in students' personal writing folders.
The quicklist idea was also useful. Helping students decipher between a moment and an era will help them think about events based on time factors. I plan to implement this strategy as well as some of the suggested variations.
I liked the "Bank of Experiences" idea for helping kids generate topics for writing too. I agree with DeShondra that it would help kids dig deeper with their ideas. I panic when I can't think of a topic, as I know kids do. The more ways we can help them to generate ideas, the better! The Rick Shelton "Expert List" sounds like a good idea DeShondra. One idea that I have used from Lucy Calkins is to tell students to think of a "watermelon topic" (big idea like vacation to beach or summer camp) and zoom in on tiny "seed ideas" within that big watermelon topic like snorkeling, or seeing a shark, etc. It is a powerful way to help students be more focused in their personal narratives.
ReplyDeleteI will post a blog on Chapter 2 tonight!
Kim