Literacy, Week 10

In chapter 8 of Writing Essentials Routman stresses the importance of finding time for writing daily. This can be free-writing or mini-lessons about writing, but to just make sure that students are able to write. In my dyad my teacher makes sure her students are writing daily. It is a block schedule and for 1st period she always does writing and then switches off 2nd period between reading and social studies. While I believe giving your students time to read daily is important as well, she make sure her students have writing class everyday. In addition, Routman suggests on page 187 to have a flexible lesson schedule with writing so that students can have more time to write and less time to sit and listen to a lesson. While reading this section I could not help but think of my master teacher and the way she sets up her writing class. Her mini-lessons only last 10-15 minutes and she usually gives the students the rest of the period to work on her writing.

In addition, in Chapter 7 Routman stresses that the teacher should always revise their work in front of the students in order for them to understand the process of revising. My teacher does a wonderful job of this. The students have been working on a fiction unit in class and the teacher has created her own story and has demonstrated for the class her struggles with revising and adding to her story. I think this helps give the students a clear idea of not only the expectation but also gives them the chance to understand how the process works. I really like that my teacher models her writing for the class, I think that it helps give the students a better understanding of the writing process.

Routman also discusses in Chapter 7 how important it is to stress spelling in students writing. I completely agree with her on this. In my 8th grade placement, many of the students are not strong spellers. For our fiction pieces even their drafted work has an abundance of spelling and grammar errors. My teacher does not put a huge emphasis on spelling but I think at the same time my teacher does not want her students put a lot of concentration into spelling the words correctly. Instead, I think she wants the students to get their ideas and writing on paper and then possibly catch their spelling errors as they begin to edit and draft their work. I just think that many of them don't catch the spelling words. When I conference with these students and read their writing I often find myself correcting their spelling errors since it really bothers me. I have been trying to not do that since that was one of the things that Routman said did not need to happen during a conference. A lot of the students have a lot of grammatical errors though and so one way I have tried to get them to edit these errors is by reading the sentences out loud to them. I am hoping that when I do this they will catch their errors through hearing the sentences being read out loud. Half of the time the students catch these errors, and the other half of the time I have to point out the corrections. It has been a learning process for me to try not to constantly correct their spelling, I don't want to make them feel bad about themselves or their work but I do think that in my own classroom I will stress spelling in writing. I think that if you don't correct mispelled words while children are young they will get in the habit of mispelling words and it will be more difficult for them to learn the right way for them to spell the words when they are older.