Our discussion this week was about 2 main things. The first point was regarding the questions for activity 2 on page 269 of Winch et al. Petrina and I spoke about the emotion portrayed in the passage of writing and that the words almost ‘tumble out’ of the student due to her excitement about going to the circus. You can really imagine the look on her face if she was in front of you, telling the story. We identified the use of words such as ‘terrific’, ‘I said YES’, ‘very funny’ and ‘good fun’ as ways of expressing the emotion and ‘let’s hurry and get ready now’ as a way of expressing urgency and excitement. We also talked about the spelling and grammatical errors that were clearly evident and that it is important as a teacher to acknowledge the fact that the writing is understandable and creative before focussing on what needs to be fixed. One technique that we identified in order to help correct some of the problems was for the student to read her story aloud to the teacher so that they can hear their work out loud and make sense of it themselves.
The second point that was discussed was the identification of the different text types or genres (Winch et al) and how we were able to identify each text type with the examples that were brought in (all from magazines). We looked as an advertisement for Seymour College as an exposition piece, ‘How to open a drinking coconut’ as a procedural piece, an advertisement about cranberry juice as an information report and a story titles ‘Shopping Meltdown’ as a recount. We then discussed the need to teach the different text types in classrooms, as it is important for students to be able to write for different audiences with different outcomes in mind. We ended on identifying the potential concerns in regards to teaching the text types and that it is important to make them relevant to their lives and give them a purpose in order to ensure the tasks are engaging.
Using every-day texts such as newspapers and magazines was a very useful experience that could easily be transferred to a school classroom context. It supports constructivist learning theories and their emphasis on connecting learning to students’ everyday lives, helping them see the relevance of learning about various genres and how they are constructed to achieve a variety of purposes.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect of the workshop that Alex has mentioned and I have continued to ponder is how to encourage a child’s creativity with the written word while scaffolding them to develop technical competency. I like the ‘reading aloud’ suggestion, and have found that beneficial for my own work, but would confine it to 1-1 or small group contexts that balance rigour and emotional ‘safety’.
The other aspect of the workshop that was really interesting was the mapping of writing development (‘First Steps’) as a valuable tool for identifying and tracking students’ progress. I hope to be able to spend more time familiarising myself with this resource.
Unfortunately I was away from this weeks workshop and therefore missed the group discussion.
ReplyDeleteThe activity in Winch page 269 was interesting as it gave me a chance to analyse my own teaching. For example, in reading Susan and Kates writing pieces and it made me realise that their is a lot more to just checking a students work from spelling and grammatical errors, as mentioned by Petrina and Alex above in regards to the two different stories. Helping a child to express their own creativity (tone, mood, expression) plays a large role too. So as a teacher we must be aware if our students are expressing what they really are trying to say in their writting.
Alex and Petrina also mentioned above reading aloud is a great technique in getting your student to realise their own spelling and grammatical errors, for example, "read this sentence out aloud, does this sound right" here you can also ask your students what they are trying to achieve in their writing- "whats the mood? how is the character feeling? how would you feel in this situation?" in order to help your students develop writing techniques. I wouldnt do this as a group situation as Petrina mentioned above but maybe work with students individually.
Similar to Emilie I was absent for this tutorial but found the preparation tasks extremely beneficial.
ReplyDeleteWinch's activity on page 269 gave me a different perspective on my own teaching and the ability that I need to possess in order to exhuberate student creativity through expression.
I agree with what has been mentioned in regards to reading aloud and think that it is extremely beneficial to students for them to not only be able to recognise their own varying tones but also how this effects the mood of what they are reading.