Wordle!

Grand Finale

This blog post is my grand finale... except that really these last two weeks of school are like an even bigger grand finale of my whole college career.. so forgive me if this post is brief.

It starting to get to be that point in the semester where if you compared the amount of days n school to the amount of assignments remaining to complete, the scale would tip pretty heavily to the assignments side. So it's crunch time and what do you do? You keep working really hard at everything and put in the maximum effort into everything. Have to finish strong. I really can't believe this is my last real semester at UGA. With only student teaching ahead of me, the "real world" is growing ever closer, scary.

So writing, what have I learned about writing through this blog? Quite a bit actually. I've learned that I really do enjoy writing when it is up to me to do it. I loathe writing papers and mandatory reflections about things I would prefer not to reflect on. But I really like reflecting on things I want to think about again. That's something that I've learned, the value of reflection. Maybe I'll continue to blog next semester as I student teach. It would be a great way to unload all the stresses of the day and also keep record of what has happened throughout the days.

I've also learned the value of kids blogging, and really writing in general. I want my students to love to write and want to do it often. I love reading student writing, it's such a great way to get to know your students individually and also helps them learn about themselves as a writer.

I've learned so much from this class. I feel as though its really benefited me and added to my teaching education. I definitely want to implement writers workshop in my classroom and this class has surely taught me how!

Mentor Texts- Crafting Leads

Marianna Moore and Pam Conley

Mentor Text Set: Crafting Leads

(General Grade Level- 1^st through 3^rd)

Leads hook the reader and heighten the reader’s curiosity by creating interest in the book. These are different examples of leads that students can use to inspire their own writing, and draw attention to quality leads in literature.

Appelbaum, D. K. (1997). Cocoa ice. New York: Orchard Books.

Chocolate comes from a faraway island where birds have pink feathers, leaves grow bigger than I am tall, and it is always summer. Children who live on the island never have to wear boots or clean ashes from the stove because winter never comes. Best of all on the island of always-summer, chocolate grows on trees. (In the form of an author’s note)

Cannon, J. (1993). Stellaluna . San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

In a warm and sultry forest far, far away there once lived a mother fruit bat and her new baby. (Beautiful imagery)

Greenburg, D. (1997). The Zack files. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

“Zack, have you ever been outside of your body?” (Interesting question)

Krull, K. (1996). Wilma unlimited: how Wilma Rudolph became the world's fastest

woman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.

No one expected such a tiny girl to have a first birthday. In Clarksville, Tennessee, in 1940, life for a baby who weighed just over four pounds at birth was sure to be limited. (Invokes curiosity)

Lithgow, J., & Payne, C. F. (2000). The remarkable Farkle McBride . New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Oh, the pity the prodigy, Farkle McBride!/No matter what instrument poor Farkle tried,/Whether Strumming,/or blowing,/or drumming/or bowing,/His musical passions were unsatisfied. (Fun rhyming pattern)

McKissack, P., & Pinkney, J. (1988). Mirandy and Brother Wind . New York: Knopf.

Swish! Swish! It was spring and Brother Wind was back.(Catches your attention with an onomonopia)

Provensen, A., & Provensen, M. (1983). The glorious flight:across the channel

with Louis Bleriot, July 25, 1909. New York: Viking Press.

It all began one morning. … The year is 1901. The place is the city of Cambrai, in France. (Blatant statements about setting)

Scieszka, J., & Smith, L. (1989). The true story of the 3 little pigs . New York, N.Y.,

U.S.A.: Viking Kestrel.

Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. Nobody knows the real story, because nobody had ever heard my side of the story. (Talking directly to the reader, fractured fairy tale)

Solheim, J. (1997). It's disgusting and we ate it! New York: Simon & Schuster

Books for Young Readers.

What would you rather eat for lunch – a steaming piece of pizza, a bowl of bugs, a live oyster, or a fish’s head? (Engrossing question)

Soto, G., & Martinez, E. (1993). Too many tamales . New York: Putnam.

Snow drifted through the streets and now that it was dusk, Christmas trees glittered in the windows. (Beautiful Imagery)

Comments4Kids

I love the idea of giving feedback to kids for their writing. I;m sure it makes them feel special knowing that someone read what they had written and connected to it. It gives them a reason to keep writing further than "Just because I have to"

http://y6miriamlord.blogspot.com/2011/04/rehmans-egyptian-sacrifice.html#comment-form

I commented on this really creative narrative by a 6th grader from somewhere abroad (I'm assuming by the language colours etc.) It said my comment would be posted after approval? so hopefully that will come through :)

http://kidblog.org/MrsFowlers2ndGrade/brody55/thinking-stem/#comment-420

This boy was doing a response to literature with Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He is in the 2nd grade.

http://kidblog.org/MrsSoltau-Heller20102011/kaitlyn115/nanaimo/#comment-264

This student seems like they are very young, based on the writing and the other posts from the same class.

I enjoyed reading these student's work. I feel like I happened upon 3 students from really different ages and writing abilities which was interesting to see.

The Phelps Gene Strikes Again

I'm not sure if we had an assigned blog post for this week or not... but in light of recent happenings I felt like I should share :)

-The following is an excerpt from a post I made on my personal blog back in the summer. Just for some background knowledge about me.

The Phelps Gene - Originally posted June 8th 2010

My Mothers maiden name is Phelps.

The “Phelps gene” is a little joke my Dad has to explain why my mom is so accident prone and clumsy. And I have gradually become the third generation of his joke.

You see it all starts with my Grandaddy who is maybe the most accident prone man alive. And alive is a key phrase because he’s also been very lucky. Grandaddy is a welder and he makes all kids of things by welding. And anyone who knows anything about welding could tell you that it tends to be a dangerous profession. Some of his most memorable accidents include a time that he was at work and he sauldered off the tip of his finger, but just kept it in his glove until his boss forced him to go to the hospital.

When he tells a story many of them have a little segwey where he’ll say “and so they drove me to Athens”… Because he lives in Madison and I guess the best hospital is in Athens.

And so they drove him to Athens… Reattached his finger an he went back to work the next day. Another time he was doing some kind of work on his roof and fell off his ladder and broke his back.

And so the drove him to Athens…

I remember really well my mom talking on the phone after that happened and hearing her say he was just thankful his truck was parked under him to break his fall. It's the little things right?

The Phelps gene runs a little more domestically for me and my mom. For my mom it’s the fact that I don’t think she’s ever used a kitchen knife without slicing open her hand. Or how she always has a bruise somewhere on her leg from running into her footboard. Little things like that. And we both share the trait that our pinky toes like to jump out and grab corners and table legs when we walk around. We Conley women are no stranger to broken toes.

Well what would you know but this weekend I had another little incident. I currently sit in my bed bandaged to my mid thigh in a temporary cast suffering from a fractured ankle. I await my big girl plaster cast which will be coming tomorrow *please let it only be a mid-calf cast, please don't make it half to go all the way up my leg like this temporary monstrosity*.

How did I do this to myself? Well it's not thaaaat exciting of a story.

I went home with my best friend/one of my room mates this weekend to Savannah. On Saturday night we went to the famous Forsyth Park to enjoy the beautiful weather and scenery. There was a swing set. We swung (swang?) on the swing set. And then I lept off my swing. A maneuver I have successfully completed many times before as a child. Repeat: As a child.

Well this time I was not successful. I don't know if it was my brittle old lady bones, the increased height and velocity with which i was swinging, or shear clumsiness that caused the fall.. but whichever I did not land gracefully on my feet as I had imagined. Instead I rolled my ankle and laid sprawled in the woodchips.

Much like my Granddaddy I did not immediately go to the hospital. Thinking it was just a sprain I went about my night, albeit rather painfully. Until this morning when I couldn't put any weight on the foot and then decided perhaps I should go get it checked out..

And so they drove me to St. Joseph's in Savannah...

Granddaddy would be proud.

Anything I Want?

To post about anything I want? Well... what do I want?

I want my apartment to be at a temperature above 62 degrees.

For that matter, I want the outside world to be at a temperature of like... 76 degrees

and sunny, definitely sunny.

I want to have some productivity back in my life.

Well.. really I want to want to be productive.

I want the next 5 1/2 weeks to go by in a blur.

Except I also want them to creep by because soon I won't be in college anymore and then who knows what I'll want.

I want to just KNOW what I will be doing when I do finish college.

Sometimes I want to trade lives with our dog? Is that weird?--just so I can sleep all day. Opposable thumbs are nice. Wouldn't want to give those up.

So yeah, thats that :)

Week in the Field and Multigenre Writing

I had very mixed emotions about spending an entire week in my field placement. I was excited to be there everyday and truly know what was going on with my children as opposed to coming in at the end of the week like we normally do. However, I was really nervous about implementing my own lesson with the class. My lessons were about producers and consumers. On the first day I split the class into three "stores" and explained that they would be acting as producers and consumers for the whole week. The students were really excited for such a fun and different activity and this made me feel really good about what I was doing. The stores then created names for themselves and decided what they wanted to produce. Through out the week they made their products and then on the last day they bought and sold what they had made between each other.

I had planned to do a writing activity with the class on the 3rd day of my unit. On all of the days for our opening activity I either read a book or we watched a movie that was focused on producers and consumers. On the 3rd day I had planned to read the book A Chair For My Mother and talk about making difficult choices. I was going to talk about how the little girl in the book saves all her money and chooses to buy her mother a comfy chair since everything they owned burned up in a fire. I was then going to have the students write about a difficult choice that they have had to make in their lives. Choice has a lot to do with producers and consumers. You have to choose what you want to sell, who you want to sell it to, what you want to make it out of, what you need to buy etc. Unfortunately... We didn't have time to do this activity which was really disapointing for me. Instead of having a day 3 I ended up having to do a day 2 part 2 because the students needed more time to make their products.

If I had my own class I would have been able to stretch the lesson more so that I would be able to fit in everything that I wanted to do. However, I was only given 40 minutes for 4 days to do everything that I had planned (which was too much) so something had to be taken out.

In the article I really liked how much the teacher cared about the students really being committed to the topic of their choice. I know that I can relate to having a terrible topic for a research project and having to stick with it for a long time even though you have no interest in it anymore. I think that the efforts put into selecting a topic would be very valuable and worthwhile because students will be so much more interested and committed to what they are learning about if they really care about it. I also really liked the idea of having to defend your choice. This will also make the students be passionate about their selection.

I found the idea of multi genre writing to be very interesting. It seemed like a new approach to your typical research paper and is something that I would definitely be interested in doing for my future class.

Ch 7, 8 and 19

Classroom management is one of my favorite topics to learn about in our education classes. The idea of setting up all of my own rules and techniques and skills we have learned throughout out college careers is really exciting to me. Maybe that's lame? Regardless, I like it. So naturally learning about how to manage your writers workshop was valuable information to me.

Technique #1 a strong teaching presence.

When I first read this heading I thought.. really? This is a technique that Katie Wood Ray thinks she can teach us? This makes me super nervous. Classroom presence seems like something so intangible to me. I guess maybe its just something you have to feel out and experiment with in practice. I definitely see where she's coming from in that its important, I only hope I will have it :) The ideas of space and materials flow right with everything else we've learned about classroom management. They seem doable, and easily so. Anyone can arrange desks in a certain way and buy plenty of folders but presenting yourself in a way that demands respect? That is a skill you must simply have or have not, and that's why not everyone can be a classroom teacher.

I'm really glad that Ray put chapter 8 in the book. I feel like when she was writing all the previous chapters it was floating in the back of her mind and then chapter 8 rolled around and everything just spilled over. But it is the perfect truth. Writing workshop is going to make you feel uneasy, out of control and uncomfortable.What Ray is saying is that if you can't handle this you can just get out. Not in a mean way, just that that's the way it is. My very favorite thing from this chapter was the following passage:

"it is our very job as teachers to know as much as we possibly can--using any means available, any means we can think of--to know as much as we can about the work students are doing in our writing workshops. But it is also true, at the very same time, that we can't possibly know all of that."

It's one of those things you really have to wrap your head around, but I completely agree and I think I will only more agree with her as I get actual experience in the classroom.

The last chapter was all about publishing. Publish or Perish as Ray liked to say. I think that publishing work has a lot of value in a classroom. It certainly teaches students what you expect there final product to be, allows them practice with actually finishing work and most importantly (for me) gives them a sense of pride from having followed a piece from start to polished finished. However, unlike Ray, deadlines do not exactly make my skirt fly up. In contrast they give me much anxiety. So I would just have to find a different way to get my students excited about publishing. Probably through the final production aspect. I would have the deadlines in place, but i don't know if I would want my students to know about them months and months in advance.

Chapters 14, 15, 17

Wow no post in a week and it feels kind of weird! I momentarily forgot how to use this thing :)

In the first chapter of this weeks reading we learned about conferencing. As a student and writer conferencing used to scare the bejezzus out of me. I tend to be a little self conscious and when it comes to something as personal as writing, the idea of showing everything to you teacher before its actually done would make me very nervous. However Katie Wood Ray's ideas about conferencing sound very comforting and I don't think they would put a shy student in an awkward place. For one Ray suggests is to conference everyday. Maybe you won't get to every student every day but just doing this with a few will take some of the stress off of it. I remember conferencing being something you had to prepare for and then when it happened the teacher would sit at her desk all day and call people up one by one. I also liked that Ray said that you "try to teach" during the conference. I also remember conferencing from my experience being a simple approve or disapprove if what you were working on... maybe I just didn't have good experiences though. I like that conferring the Ray way is a very deliberate act of teaching to students individually. I also really enjoyed the conference notes table, but then I'm just a fan of neatly organized tables.

In Chapter 15 about sharing I really enjoyed reading about the 4 different types of sharing. i never would have thought that there were so many ways you could do a simple thing like sharing. Survey sharing was particularly interesting to me because with it everyone gets a chance to share something meaningful but it is still a quick way to do so. I really think sharing is an extremely valuable time. I have seen students go up to the share chair and beam with pride and confidence as they read off what they've been laboring over and it's such a rewarding thing to seen.

Chapter 17 was about questioning. Something that, as teachers, we should know a lot about. I feel like asking questions is something that comes extremely naturally to teachers. We just want to know about the students, what they like, what they're doing, how we can help them. At least thats the way I am. I think it's nice that Katie Wood Ray attempts to teach us the right way to do this. Something this reading made me think about was the statement Ray said that the questions you ask are a part of the curriculum and assessment. Asking questions of a student is, kind of obviously, the best way to understand what they are doing. You can make assessments or inferences based on what you read but if you ask a child about his work it may help you read it with that certain lens that really helps you understand.

Chapters 9,10, 13 Reflection

"The first thing writers need in their environment is time."

This is something that I really want to remember in my writing workshop in future years. I have seen too many times when writing time is left to like 15 minutes after a reading. This was the case in my Kindergarten class last semester. First off the students couldn't really write and then they were only given about 10 minutes to hone their skill. The things that I enjoyed most from chapter 9 was just all the talk of what students need to work during their writing workshop. And the things they need to be successful at writing are not necessarily the "tools" that we are taught like pre-writing etc. Most writers don't even use prewriting things like webs and brainstorms etc... because in general you are thinking of things to write and what to write all the time.

I really like the support that this textbook gives us as upcoming teachers. The way that Ray doesn't expect us to already have tons of experiences, but instead gives us a framework for what we can implement easily when we do have a classroom. For example I liked the way that it broke down what we need to know for the curriculum for our students into 5 different categories: strategies, techniques, questions, relationships, conventions. The category that I was drawn to the most was the relationships category where it explains ways to connect things. I feel like this is a skill that needs to be used a lot in a class because otherwise some students might not see the value in writing. However if you give them relationships between writing and other things then they may be more willing to see the importance.

What is a Writing Workshop?

I feel as though there are many teachers who host "writing workshops" in their classrooms without actually following set procedures or really having a philosophy about what they're doing. Katie Wood Ray is the opposite of that. She has thoroughly thought out her philosophy about teaching and especially writing workshop.

Some of her big ideas that I really liked were that writing workshop isn't a time where students sit silently at their desks and scratch away at a notebook doing prewriting, first draft, second draft, peer edit, final draft. Instead it can be a fun time where they can be creative, brainstorm with friends, be comfortable and most importantly write about what they're interested in in the way that works best for them.

This is the scene that I'm used to associating with writing. Lines of desks with students working diligently, quietly. This is also a scene that most students tend to hate. I think that whenever writing workshop becomes something tedious and boring students begin to not like writing at all and then they head down the road of thinking they are a "bad" writer.

The other big problem that I think teachers may have with writing workshop is that they don't believe they have enough time in the day to make room for a considerable amount of time where students can just work freely on writing. Katie Wood Ray says about this,

" There is no such thing as 'more time.' There is only time (no more or less) and we have to decide how we'll use what time there is."

In the same way teachers have to make room in their schedules for quality math and reading instruction the same needs to be said for writing.

I also really liked the metaphor Ray used to compare writer's workshop to lunchtime. I have 100% seen what she's talking about where students write for a little while, get done and then ask questions about what they should be doing now. It makes so much sense to me to relate to the students that writing time is like lunchtime. At lunch time you don't finish eating and then wonder what to do next. You finish eating and then you talk with your friends, you maybe get some ice cream, you relax. With writing time you should have the same idea. You work on your writing, if you finish early you can read over it again, you could consult with a peer, or you can go back and add some ice cream, in the form of more descriptive or beautiful words, but overall you take the WHOLE time for writing.

I'm very interested to read more of our texts and learn more about writing workshops. I can definitely see myself implementing these ideas in my own classroom some day!

New

New semester, new blog,

This is my final spring semester at UGA???!!! What? How is that true? For one of my classes that teaches about writing I am to create a blog where I can write down my ideas and other things such as that.

So I'll be posting later this week about some of the readings from my textbook...

For now I'll just say welcome to my education blog!