Monday, March 1, 2010
Writing
Yay another blog down! Well so far in my practicum I haven’t yet got my hands on some of the student’s writings. They are currently working on story/ heroic tales which are due Wednesday, so I am going to go in again to hopefully get a look at what they have been creatively working on and if what Mrs. D has been working on with them in class has actually work/ improved their writing skills. What they have been working on for the last couple of weeks which I am sure has been a lot longer is parts of a sentence and parts of speech, they are being tested on this tomorrow so maybe I will be able to look at their tests and see what the most common error that was made. Mrs. D told me on my first day that the students didn’t know the subject, verb, adjectives, est. so she was working with them to build their knowledge on these things, she said that if the students didn’t know these things how can she expect them to write proper sentence with proper word order. She is also having the students explain why the subject is the subject why it’s a predicate nominative and not a predicate adjective…. This has falls right into the section in class of sentence structure. I have a feeling that there writing isn’t going to be much different from their speech. But because my practicum day is on Monday which is their grammar day like I mentioned before I am going to go in on Wednesday so I can take a look at their writing and hopefully be able to finish this blog entry.
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What I love about your practicum and your teacher's approach to the students is that she understands that they still need instruction in sentence structure and "if the students didn't know these things how can she expect them to write proper sentence with proper word order". That really brings me back to our readings and discussions about the process of learning and that there is a certain degree of proficiency that a student must reach before they are ready to take on new instruction. It really seems that you teacher has a very strong grasp on what the students are capable of and is concerned with how she can increase their degrees of proficiency.
ReplyDeletePS-I haven't been able to see much writing in my practicum either because a lot of the class time is dedicated to discussions and evaluations of texts. My class has actually just turned in a poetry journal and I am hoping that my teacher will let me take a peek! I love reading hand-written work because it seems so much more personal than formal documents from the computer that are spellchecked and most often a little revised!
FOR MANDY
ReplyDeleteMandy! What a fun idea for a writing unit: story/heroic tales. That sounds like a lot of fun. It will be interesting to see if the students make the connection between their tales and what they have been working on in the grammar department. I too have not been able to see any writing in my practicum. My class is mostly about discussion of the books that the students were assigned.
I sound like a broken record when I use my daughters schooling as part of the things I am learning about teaching; but I am really starting to look at what my children’s teachers are doing in a whole new light and I am really appreciating what I am learning. My daughter recently came home and was complaining how everyday at the beginning of class the teacher hands out a work sheet. On that sheet are sentences and then an area for the students to write. The first part is simply labeling and recognizing parts of speech. Sometimes she has the word or phrase labeled and requires them to identify or she will focus on just one part of speech and give them sentences or a paragraph and have the students underline. The second part of the work sheet is an area where they can write a paragraph and then identify within their own writing certain parts of speech. Since my daughter doesn't seem to have any problems with this, she has become bored. When I contacted her teacher about this, the teacher explained that 90% of her class was unable to identify basic parts of speech. She felt like your teacher, Mandy, that it is important that the students have this down firmly. She said that nearly all of these students had failed in regular grade level English classes and daily repetition in recognizing, labeling and writing was the only way she could ensure that not only would their writing skills will become proficient at least at their own grade level. When she has done this daily for a whole year, the writing level of all her students increased so much that some of them are usually able to rejoin their peers in their normal grade level English classes. Apparently this teacher has found that simply going back to the basics works for many of her students... O and yes..to address my daughters boredom and also to address my daughters weakness, we have expanded her paragraph writing into a short essay project every day...because she struggles in connecting ideas and forming a comprehensive essay. I look forward to hearing from you about the writing samples!
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