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.