Paradise Post Reports on National Day on Writing
From the Paradise Post (10/21/09):
Pine Ridge School celebrates National Writing Day
On Tuesday, Pine Ridge School celebrated the National Day on Writing, starting with a morning assembly with Principal David Burdine and Academic Coach Betsy Amis, who read a book to their audience of K-5 graders, “If You Were a Writer,” by Joan Lowery Nixon. Though the book focused on developing ideas for stories, the individual classroom lessons were not about creative writing.
Suzanne Linebarger, a third grade teacher at Pine Ridge who serves as Associate Director for the Northern California Writing Project, went classroom to classroom teaching the principles and craft of writing.
The lesson was “Exploring the Craft of Writing from Inquiry to Practice.” The “inquiry” part was to help students become active readers, increase the power of responding to literature, and demonstrate making a claim, supporting it with proof and using summarization effectively.
The “practice” part explored elements of writing such as examining text, word gathering, the author’s purpose, a writer’s craft, a summary, a claim, and proof. Students also learned about good claims (contestable, compelling, complex, and coherent) and effective conclusions (which provide new information for the reader, demonstrate the writer’s new understanding, reflect on the topic, and connect facts with opinion).
Students learned that when a writer makes a powerful claim, the purpose of the piece becomes clear both to reader and the writer. When a writer has a claim, the details become proof and the conclusion becomes a demonstration of new awareness and understanding, rather than a restatement of the obvious.
The students also learned about genre. Though it covers categories of writing like fiction, poetry, and drama, genre can also refer to everyday uses of language such as eulogies, editorials, proposals, arguments, menus, lab reports, manifestos, rules, emails, and more.
And there are a lot of purposes for writing, students discovered. Students learned about writing in response to things they have read, writing to inform, predict or persuade, writing to take notes, remember things, solve problems, writing for class sharing, reflective writing and technical writing for math and science, developing procedures, for recipes, and more.
To help organize their thinking and encourage writing, Linebarger introduced the students to Northern California Writing Project “thinkbooks,” notebooks designed to improve student’s motivation and engagement with their writing. The thinkbooks are supposed to be used throughout the day, any time writing can be used for learning—but there is no grading, no erasing, and never help with spelling.
The idea is to help students learn to compose well-written pieces. According literature from the National Writing Project (a professional development organization for teachers helping to incorporate more writing in their classes), writing is the gateway to success in school and beyond. It helps students read, solve problems, and understand concepts in every part of the curriculum. Writing is also the “currency” of the new workplace and global economy.
But it’s not a skill that can be learned on the spot. Writing is complex and challenging, even for the most accomplished writers. Now, Pine Ridge students are celebrating writing, and practicing.
October 28 2009 02:43 pm | NCWP
