Ch. 4: Day One: Help Children to Write and Keep Writing
Ch. 7: Conditions for Effective Writing
Chapter 4 will be a great resource for me once I have my own classroom. It contains many different examples of how to get students' attention and turn writing into something fun that they can understand. It discussed the need for children to understand why writing is important. If we ask them to write before they understand writing, they will not be motivated to perform. I really liked the idea of passing students small notes to convey important messages or discussing signs and how they convey meaning. Once you can relate writing to the students' lives, they will begin to understand why teachers think it is so important.
The other topic that Chapter 4 addressed was alternatives to narratives. Not all children feel comfortable with personal narratives, and they might be much more responsive to writing something like a list instead. Making lists is a great way to excite children about writing, because they are happy to talk about how much they know about a topic. Kids like to be experts, so listing will help them feel like they know a lot and give them writing practice, while also possibly sparking their curiosity for further research on the topic.
Chapter 7 focused more on how to create a perfect classroom environment for writing. There are many aspects of a normal classroom that are not conducive to writing or learning to write. Students need to be able to write every day. This will help them to enjoy it, instead of dreading the time of writing block. Students also need the freedom to choose their topic. When given options, students become more comfortable with the task of writing and they begin to enjoy it more.
Reading these chapters was a funny experience, because right now I am attempting National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo), which is the task of writing 50,000 words of a story over the course of 30 days in November. Therefore, all of this writing advice is something that I took very much to heart. All of what these articles have been saying is the point of this exercise: to write every day, to choose your own topic, to not review/edit everything that you write right away. So I know from first hand experience that these tips do indeed work! NaNoWriMo has a young writers program that has been used effectively in classrooms many times, and I would love the opportunity to use it in my own classroom some day.
