our story Inna Point Warf

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My Writing Philosophy

When you’re teaching kids to write you’re teaching them to think. Writing is the window through which all thinking starts. Sheryl Brock. With this students must be taught to write purposefully in order for them to become independent thinker. To do this student must be taught how to write.

Writing is defined as any piece of written work as writing, especially when you are bearing in mind the style of language used in it. As start before when students learn to write they learn to think. Writing is an essential skill to attain in the classroom. Writing is the principal source upon which student’s work will be critique, learning will be judged. Writing prepares our students with communication and thinking skills. Writing allow us to visiblable see and interpret  what our students are.  

Due to the fact that writing and thinking are complicatedly bound. Each and every time our students learn a new way to think so they must learn to write in a new way. These “new ways” of writing include both new thought practices and new ways and types of writing.

Students will be faced with writing differently for each subject area and still maintain the creative aspect of writing.

Our students need differentiated  instruction and taught the writing process and trends  constructive feedback in order for our students to move from the different stages of writing  Thus, learning to write  work best when they are sequenced or scaffolded, with larger conceptual responsibilities that is  explained, and with adequate time  to go through each process effectively.

We as teachers must not see writing as the end result but see writing in  itself the process of learning, and students require instruction, feedback, and support throughout the whole writing process until they are able to do so on their own.

With this wealth of knowledge I plan on making my classroom writing friendly by: Bring Writing to life when  students have discovered different types of writing such as plays, I will offer them further motivation by producing some or all of those works. I will also put on a class play that the students worked on together, or you can bring a video camera and let students film mini movies, or even news broadcasts. Students will take pride in their writing and will get excited to show off their creations to fellow students and their parents.  Students will be encouraged to explore structured writing stimuluses have their place in and around the  classroom, but some students will write once left to write in the way that best suits them.   

 Benjamin Franklin once stated that we must ‘ either write something worth reading or do something worth writing, this will be my mantra for my students.  As I progress in becoming a purposeful writing teacher. I aim to find more innovative ways to bring out the best writer in my students.

WRITING PHILOSOPHY

Becoming a good writer is slow going and challenging, it is a complex process because learning how to write well takes practice, skills, strategies and courage. As teachers of writing it can be concluded that students learn to writ by first developing their fine motor skills which is making small movements and hand eye coordination. After students have developed these skills students are ready to hold a pencil or even use their finger to write in the air. Moreover, after they have learnt to hold a pencil they will use the pencil to scribble until they can form letters then write words, sentences and finally make paragraphs, for me personally some students learn to write because they might have been exposed to a lot of book whether it is at home or at school. However, by seeing good models, students develop a sense of how good writing is structured. 

Being exposed to these books allows them to have a wider range of vocabulary and allow their imagination to be broad. As a teacher who will be teaching students how to write, i will provide my students with the materials and tools that are necessary for them to write. Additionally, i will utilize different writing strategies such as in class writing, teaching writing explicitly and summarizing just to name a few. According to Bo Bennette, "A dream becomes a goal when action is taken towards its achievement." Therefore my dream is for my students to become effective writers and my goal is for them to write different genres for many purposes and audiences. 

Further, you may wonder how this goal will be achieved. I t can be achieved by introducing students to the five processes of writing, which are, Pre writing,drafting revising, editing and publishing and more so integrate writing in every lesson that is being taught with different strategies.

PROMOTING WRITING IN THE PRIMARY GRADES AND DESIGNING WRITING ASSESSMENTS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE PRIMARY GRADES

Teaching children to write is hard because writing is not so much one skill as it is a bundle of skills that includes sequencing, spelling, re reading and supporting big ideas with examples Fletcher & Portalupi (2001) pg 1. Unit 5 and 6 gave me a lot of knowledge on the fact that teaching writing can happen in several different ways such as, teaching writing whole class, as a group or one on one with the students. I learnt that in order for students to be engaged in writing a class environment should be prepared wit tools for revising their writing, materials for bookmarking, reinforcing material such as dictionaries and teacher made charts to guide their writing efforts. To further say learning about assessing students writing performance increased my knowledge on the fact that rubrics can be used instead of analyzing and marking students work anyhow based on judgement. However, rubrics are important tools that teachers use to evaluate their students finished pieces. 

Additionally, evaluating students writing is therefore beneficial to teachers because it helps the teacher to know what lessons to teach to the students or i the students are in need of a one on one with the teacher. Added to that, i also found that the primary trait scoring rubric 6+traits in writing is a more effective rubric to correct students work, due to the fact that the rubric varies with the writing purposes and audiences. As a teacher who will be teaching students to write, i will therefore teach them strategies for planning, revising their own writing pieces, strategies for summarizing reading materials, the purpose of their writing product, gathering and organizing their ideas before writing and how to increasingly write complex sentences.

WRITING AND THE READING, WRITING CONNECTION

Reading is like breathing in; writing is like breathing out (Pam Allyn) During units 3 and 4 we were exposed to the purpose, audience and the complexity of the language when writing. When i am thinking about or actually writing, I had never thought of or studied about audience and the complexity of the language, i use to just write bearing in mind my purpose. However, now that i have been exposed to the different purposes of writing, audience and complexity, as a future educator it has certainly changed me. Previously, i thought about writing to just inform, entertain, persuade, educate, explain describe and advertise were the different types of writing but i know now that they are the purposes of writing. Within this writing course i was also introduced to a number of audiences to whom students can target when creating  their pieces to include parents, children with different age ranges, adults and teachers or a general audience. Most importantly, when writing the complexity of the writing should be taken into consideration such as the words we choose, how we structure the sentences and the format or the type of writing we wish to utilize. Also, i was unaware that any of the purposes of writing can be used to teach any topic to any audience. For example the topic of Sex Education can be used to entertain, persuade, educate and still explain to both adults and even young children.

As a teacher who will be teaching students to become successful writers, i will introduce them to multiple forms of writing and a variety of purposes because it is a great benefit have when learning to write broadly. Writing has many genres, styles, purposes and more so many activities which students can be engaged in while writing. In class we looked at the genres of writing which included stories, informational, descriptive. poetry, letter writing and journals, however, there are different styles of writing which will determine if the writing is dressed up or dressed down by the word choices, sentence fluency and writers voice. The styles could be in the form of frozen, formal, consultative, casual and intimate.I additionally learnt that the different forms of writing can be written in these styles. Stories too can be written in a frozen style for example the bible. We also looked at the genres and what they can be used for like, story writing for entertaining and recalling an incident which really happened. I was also happy when we were introduced to the different activities teachers may utilize with their students to write different genres such as description. Descriptive workshop narratives for telling it your way, poetry opposites attract, letter writing work with me and i will work with you and journals, scribble da ting. I really found these activities very useful simple, interesting and entertaining and will actually engage students in writing the different types of genres.

WRITING AS A STAGE A PROCESS AND A TRAIT

I love the process of writing, it helps students to be effective writers, especially the ones who do not like to write. During Unit 2, we looked at writing as a stage a process and a trait. I was well aware that there were stages of writing just like there are stages of reading from my reading and writing course during the summer. The names within the stages, however, were a bit unfamiliar, I learnt that there are four stages in writing . 

The first stage is the emergent stage where students normally, scribble, trace, writes narrative stories and more. I also learnt that as they move on from the emergent stage that they move to the early stage where they will be engaged in their own story writing, able to plot stories and well exposed to different genres of writing such as, stories poems, expository's and fables. As students have mastered the first two stages they will move on to the transitional stage where they will be introduced to a variety of strategies to spell different words and then finally move to the last stage, where they will be able to critique their own writing and that of others.

What stood out most to e within this unit, was that all students would not be at the same level within their writing and so as a new teacher coming into the system would have to work really hard to better myself in order to assist them in different ways to suit their varying needs. Added to the previous, we got the opportunity to look at the writing process. i began realizing that the more i became expose to the process of writing, the more it became clearer within my mind. Within the writing process there is pre writing where students gather their information, drafting where they put their ideas together in a coherent way, revising where students will look over their work and look to add, remove or substitute letters, words or phrases, editing where they will check for the conventions of writing and the final process where they will be able to share the final copy of their written pieces to audiences such as their peers, teachers and other persons.

Further within the course, i was exposed to the traits of writing which were totally new to me. They were all very interesting as the lecturer explained that there are 6+1 traits of writing and that each trait has its very own way of teaching, modelling and assessing writing. The traits include, ideas,organizing , word choice, voice, sentence fluency, conventions and presentation. I am still not too clear on their complete uses, but i intend to become a young intentional educator who will read additional information so that o may become proficient, this will only seek to help my students. I really enjoyed that each trait has a song to boost students motivation and memory, when students are creating their pieces. I intend to utilize what i have learnt within my future classroom while taking into consideration, the differentiated needs of my students, so that they may become effective writers.

TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN TEACHING WRITING

Teaching Writing takes time and effort. According to Anne Lamott, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts." "You need to start somewhere." As a teacher who will be teaching writing, awareness of strategies to help young writers become expert writers, is of paramount importance to have as an educator, During this writing course i was introduced to a number of strategies including, grammar instruction, summarizing, publishing writing and writing to start class, just to name a few. We were given a short demonstration of how each strategy should or can be used. I was impressed by the strategy "choosing topics to write about" this strategy allows students to choose their own topics to write about so that they can better relate to it. There were other strategies which i am confused about, and still is confused about, namely teaching writing explicitly. However i think that all the strategies are useful and great. I strongly believe that all of these strategies will have a positive effect on the writing of our future students. Additionally, in class, we looked at some possible challenges students may struggle with including" Writing does not have prosody, body language, facial expression and the writer should not assume that there is shared context with the reader." for instance, de-contextualized tasks, students may be asked to write about something in their past, for example, their Easter Vacation. The challenge for them is to rely on their memory, which students will indicate to the teacher by saying, "teacher i cannot remember or do not remember" which makes the task difficult for them. Usually strategies are developed to address or fix difficulties. So, in class we scanned through the trends in teaching writing and found that this problem arises, teachers can utilize a gallery walk among other things to help students remember.