Teaching Experience time 'Writing'

My management of 'writing time' has been the same for all of my teaching career. Every time I show teachers how I do it, they think it is a brand new idea, but teachers have been doing similar things for nearly 30 years. I was fortunate to have started my teaching life in a wonderful South Auckland School with an inspiring Principal and an incredible management team. Staff PD was taken by 'experts' on the staff and what I learned at those sessions have carried me through my life of teaching. In later schools I taught at I gained many more strategies that lead me to fine tune my teaching practice. The management procedures I am going to write about I have used with New Entrant to Intermediate, Decile One to ten children.
As I have said many times, Management is the key to successful, productive teaching and learning. Children should know at any one time what they should be doing 'now' and 'next'. I spend a lot of time in teachers' classes, and one of the things I see frequently is children coming up to the teacher saying 'I have finished this, what do I do next?' Here are some of the management strategies and the teaching processes I follow to stop this from happening.
I present the students with a slideshow about the writing genre. There are examples of drafting and publishing, the process is broken down in stages, and there are links to website games.
Step One:
Every day we look at the slideshow but we will concentrate on one aspect. I usually write a class drafting example at the same time, reworking and editing everyday.
Here is the Explanation example I used with these children

How to write Excellent Explanations

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

Here is a link to a Recount Example.
Step Two:
Modelling of Writing. Here are some examples of how to do this.

• in the school where I was demonstrating I used an Inspiration framework that I have designed
• this framework is worked on everyday until it is ready to be published as a class presentation
  

other examples are

• Using a notebook page in an IWB or mimo, insert a lined page template and write an example to be edited

• use the coloured pen editing tools, highlighting and line tools for editing
• no IWB but have projector; then use Word/Pages, type in the story, editing as you go
• KidPix: use the pen tool to write the story, change the colours for editing purposes

Step Three:
The Self Managing Taskboard
I have used this taskboard since the early nineties. When we start a writing topic everybody begins at the drafting section. Students then move themselves from drafting to proofreading. They follow all of the proof reading steps ( read aloud, peer proof read etc). Move to Conferencing.













Step Four:
Drafting
I like to give students plenty of choices when drafting. This encourages some of the reluctant writers as there are some new and different ways of drafting.















Step Five
Conferencing

While waiting to conference with the teacher students can 'do' the Conferencing choices. These cater for student's different learning styles, interests and intelligences. It also means that they always have something to do while they are waiting for me to conference with them.Part of managing themselves students record their conferencing choices onto a tracking file






Step Six
Publishing
After the student has conferenced with me we discuss which would be the best way to publish their work. Once their work is published they then start a new draft and work through the cycle again. Here is a slideshow with some examples of ways to publish your writing.

Publishing Writing Ideas

View more OpenOffice presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

Finally here is the Individual Explanation Assessment.

Walking the Talk Day Seven

Volume session went well with most children doing well on the Class Activity.
Some had to stay back for the Volume workshop and they worked well in a peer teaching session.

Teachers that were visiting were impressed with how 'on task' the children were, and how engaged in their learning.





Later I got the 'Year 4' expert in Digital Lego to demonstrate to other students (and teachers in the room) how to use some shortcuts and tricks to create models using the projector and laptop.


Everyday I show a new example of how to publish in an interesting way. Today was 'Journal Page' which is where you have several pictures covering one page and text is placed on top. I will have some student examples of those tomorrow. Here is a Comic Slideshow example created by one student
and one created in Comic Life!

Walking the Talk Day Five

I haven't seen the children since Thursday last week (ran a course for teachers on the Friday!) I was interested to see if they could remember the routines, I was pleasantly surprised, everything ran as if I hadn't been away. This reinforces what I always say to teachers... if you have strong routines, high expectations, and well organised management (and a quiet voice) all students will respond well. It doesn't matter if they are decile one or ten, they still respond in the same way. I did this same 'teaching experience' in a decile one class a couple of years ago, and a couple of teachers that have visited so far have seen me 'in action' in both schools, using the same management techniques and children reacting in the same way.

Most of the students are using the mimio well and are quite capable of calibrating it. Surprisingly enough we do not have to calibrate that often (maybe 3 times a day) even though the projector sits on a table in the middle of the room. Students have become very adept at it.

Everyday for writing I demonstrate a different way of publishing. Today I modelled Comic Life for Publishing. Children have used it before so several of them worked at it confidently. Some are working on Photo Story 3 (free for Windows), publishing on their wikipage or typing it up in Word or Pages with Borders, titles and their Superhero graphics. Some have published using the Publish button in Inspiration. One child has made a Podcast 'with a little help from his friends', all of which we will add to his wikispace.
I only have 3 more days left so I'm going to show them my 'Comic Slideshow' idea in PowerPoint and upload to Slideshare and how to create an iMovie in 3'easy' steps!

Update on Research topic: I think they get what I mean about creating Research questions and keywords. We will be searching for information tomorrow!

Walking the talk: Day three

The children are settling into their routines well. The early morning task went well with the timetabled students screen clipping the news headline, weather and this day in history. It was great to see other children helping the students if they were not sure of what they were doing.
We used the screen clippings later in the morning as the children who had collected them reported back to the class. We used the News Headline to highlight what keywords are, as this is a focus of our Research Unit.


Maths went well with more of the children starting to get the hang of organising themselves. There are still some children that need to be directed back to their assessment sheets. A few more internet problems happened but it all was going well by morning tea.
Writing time went smoothly with students going straight to their tasks once we had the teaching point of the day, which was conjunctions. We looked at conjunction game altogether. I used the mimio pad and that was passed around as students took turns at answering the questions 'with a little help from their friends'.




Everyday I like to show an example of excellent publishing, whether it is something that a child has done or a piece I have put together.
Today I demonstrated how you can turn an Inspiration framework into a published piece of writing.

Here is the Explanation framework, this is a piece I use for modelling.
I showed the class how you use the 'Transfer' button to transfer the writing into Word.









It appears with the Framework as a graphic and the text only also appears so that they can edit their work. It was really that 'just in time' learning as they learned how to highlight text, turn bullets off and use the decrease indent button to align the text to the right of the page.


Next I presented a finished exemplar reiterating my expectations of a high quality finish to their publishing.
I was very pleased with some of the work that was done after this teaching session!.









The Reading programme went very well with all children on task and doing a variety of activities from adding to their Chapter Title Assignment, Listening to Audiobooks via iPod, cloze activities using the mimio...or just reading!




Students decided on their Research Question today after a lot of drawing out of the previous knowledge they had attained, but more on that another day!

Explanation Writing

When I start a new genre of writing I like to introduce it by preparing a PowerPoint that goes through all the steps of writing. For at least 2 weeks I would start my writing session with this presentation. Everyday we would start off our writing with this PowerPoint and we would concentrate on a different aspect each day i.e. Day Two...look at introductions (go over Present Tense) Day three...points in order. The PowerPoint would also be printed out so that children can refer to all of it at anytime. I like to have hyperlinked games incorporated into the presentation that can be played as part of the lesson, and children have access to these through a PowerPoint that is available on their computers .

How to Write Excellent Explanations - Upload a Document to Scribd

I also design a framework that children can use on the computer or as a print out. Here is an example of one made in Kidspiration and here it is in Inspiration The more fluent the writer would depend how long they would spend on this framework. I would expect fluent writers to spend at least 2 to 3 days reworking and editing their writing.

How to write Excellent Explanations

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.