That's a Wrap!

My title is quite deceiving considering I'm referring to the wrap of another school year, another degree, and yet I'm graduating from a program that will ensure I am in school for the rest of my life. Ha! Jokes on me, right? 

Anyhow, today was the end of our shared classroom experience in Writing Across the Curriculum. This time of year is always so bittersweet. I'm glad the work load is finally over, but so sad about leaving this amazing program, the fantastic professors that have guided me along the way, and I'm especially sad to leave the family I made out of strangers. All of these people and elements have contributed so much to who I am as a teacher. I always knew teaching was a part of me, but it wasn't until this year that I could define why, or really who I was as a teacher. This class helped develop my philosophy of education, but more specifically the need for balanced literacy in the classroom, ensuring all students are both readers and writers- in all contexts.

This week's question is how do I believe the different kinds of writing will inform my teaching in content areas, and I think the most obvious answer is it will allow me to see whether my students actually understand what I'm teaching them. In various ways, it isn't until a student can explain their thinking that they actually understand it. A lot of writing tools will help students organize their thoughts and keep track of their thinking process. Writing allows you to not only see a student's final product, but also the process it took to get there. Writing allows me to see the students literacy levels, understanding and ability to communicate, and sometimes even their learning preferences. 

My content area is English, so it's quite obvious how different kinds of writing will inform my teaching in my content area. I'll be able to view student's abilities to write different types of writing conventions, fluency, style, grammar, and anything writing related really. Writing will help students make meaning of their learning, make connections with themselves, other texts, and the world around them. It's interesting because the the curriculum document makes references to all the things I believe writing does naturally, the document states: 

Successful language learners:

•  understand that language learning is a necessary, life-enhancing, reflective process; communicate – that is, read, listen, view, speak, write, and represent – effectively and with confidence;
•  make meaningful connections between themselves, what they encounter in texts, and the world around them; think critically;
• understand that all texts advance a particular point of view that must be recognized, questioned, assessed, and evaluated; 
• appreciate the cultural impact and aesthetic power of texts; use language to interact and connect with individuals and communities, for personal growth, and for active participation as world citizens 

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Although English is my content area, I am also a Junior/Intermediate teacher, which means I will be teaching much more than just my content area. I truly believe that everything I will get out of Language classes, I can also get out of other subjects. Writing really helps bring things together, form context, and make connections. 

Sharing is Caring

Saw this great picture on someone's blog, thought it was worth re-posting!

It's called the Profile of a Modern Teacher, I like to call it The Many Faces of a Teacher. I'd like to believe they both work...no? I was once told that teachers are really just actors, really great actors, reaching the end of teacher's college, I couldn't agree more.

Mentoring continued

Student mentoring was a mixture of finding the students strengths, working on areas of improvement, and encouraging him to find his own writing style. We worked on sentence and paragraph transitions, some sentence structure, perspective, and for the purpose of the scene summaries, only including key information and summary structure.

Here are some samples of the writing and editing we did. 

Some Resources we used were:

How to Write a Summary

With thanks to: Swales, John M. and Christine B. Feat. Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 

 Essential Tasks and Skills. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1994. 105-130.

Preparing to Write: To write a good summary it is important to thoroughly understand the material you are working with. Here are some preliminary steps in writing a summary. 

1. Skim the text, noting in your mind the subheadings. If there are no subheadings, try to divide the text into sections. Consider why you have been assigned the text. Try to determine what type of text you are dealing with. This can help you identify important information. 

2. Read the text, highlighting important information and taking notes. 

3. In your own words, write down the main points of each section. 

 4. Write down the key support points for the main topic, but do not include minor detail. 

5. Go through the process again, making changes as appropriate. 

As well as lists of transition words taken from: English Language Smart words- Transition Words http://www.smart-words.org/linking-words/transition-words.html

And The Mentoring Begins!

The last few weeks have been an interesting experience mentoring students at Hawthrone Public School in Ottawa. It had definitely been a while since I had read grade 8 writing, and wow was I shocked! It’s an interesting experience for many reasons; for one thing I don’t think anyone was really sure what to expect. All we were told was we would be working with grade 8 gifted students, hopefully working on the students writing process. Secondly, I had never worked with gifted students. The anxiety was a tad overwhelming, on both my part and my students. But once we got started, I realized that mentoring and being in a classroom was much better than being at the university. 

Our first meet started with trying to get to know each other. I wanted to know what motivated my student, what he thought about his own writing, and what he wanted to work on. He showed me an essay he had recently written and we discussed his writing style and preferences when it came to choosing his writing assignments. The period went by much faster than we anticipated, but I was glad we spent most of the time talking and getting to know each other. Although the meet was short, we were able to set some goals for the following weeks and outlined the areas of both strength and areas of improvements. My student decided he wanted to work on perspective, paragraph transition, and overall flow throughout his writing.  

The following weeks of mentoring consisted of continuing to get to know each other and working  on some writing assignments. My student decided he wanted to work on scene summaries for A Midsummers Nights Dream. We started the process by getting him to write his summaries. We used summary examples to try to compare his writing to others, and worked together to edit his writing. The key to improving his writing is not only to edit his work, but also be able to recognize the changes he is making.

Mentoring has been about a month of work in progress, next week will be our last week with the students. Stay tuned to see the comparison of where we started and where we are finishing!