Tool 08
Writing
Objectives
Plan writing lessons that guide students to respond to what they are learning and reading.
Attend to the lower level transcription skills during writing.
Provide instruction that helps students capture and formalize their thinking.
Understand and incorporate purposeful instruction in note taking, sentence writing, and summary writing.
Part 1: Introduction - Writing Supports Stronger Comprehension Skills
Topic 1: Memory and Learning
Writing and thinking are strongly related. We want to ask students to write about what they have read, listened to, and learned across the content areas.
Writing helps student form memories for the information they are learning.
Topic 2: Underlying Skills
The underlying transcription skills must be applied automatically in order to transcribe, to put into print, one’s formulated ideas.
When it comes down to it, many of our students are able to voice quite insightful or meaningful thoughts, but the rubber meets the road when it’s time for them to transfer those thoughts to paper to share with others.
Topic 3: Overarching Skills
Teachers learn about thehigher-levelskills that require the contribution of language itself: Background knowledge, vocabulary, concept formation, verbal reasoning, the pragmatics writers bring to the careful choice of words when considering their audience, and knowledge of text structures.
The Reading Rope (Scarborough) is used to discuss the language comprehension skills and how they also contribute to writing.
Part 2: Research - The Complexity of Writing
Topic 1: Memory and Learning
Writing and thinking are strongly related. We want to ask students to write about what they have read, listened to, and learned across the content areas.
Writing helps student form memories for the information they are learning.
Topic 2: Underlying Skills
The underlying transcription skills must be applied automatically in order to transcribe, to put into print, one’s formulated ideas.
When it comes down to it, many of our students are able to voice quite insightful or meaningful thoughts, but the rubber meets the road when it’s time for them to transfer those thoughts to paper to share with others.
Topic 3: Overarching Skills
Teachers learn about the higher-level skills that require the contribution of language itself: Background knowledge, vocabulary, concept formation, verbal reasoning, the pragmatics writers bring to the careful choice of words when considering their audience, and knowledge of text structures.
The Reading Rope (Scarborough) is used to discuss the language comprehension skills and how they also contribute to writing.
Part 3: Practice - Written Responses to Reading
Topic 1: Introduction
The classroom videos demonstrate writing instruction with several grade levels.
Each topic – Notes, Writing Sentences, and Writing Summaries – starts with an opening discussion.
Topic 2: Writing Notes
Writing notes provides young students with the important practice needed to build automaticity with transcription skills.
Writing notes with older students is critical for academic success.
Topic 3: Writing Sentences
Sentences are the avenue through which we translate thought into writing, but writing sentences is not an innate skill.
Teachers learn several techniques to help students write thoughtful, well-structured sentences.
Topic 4: Writing Summaries
Methods for writing summary statements for young students and full summaries for older students are included.
Teachers learn techniques that can help students write summaries. The techniques used strengthen all types of writing we ask students to do.
Part 4: Planning - Daily Writing Prompts
Topic 1: Strategies for Using Notes, Sentences, and Summaries in Daily Writing Exercises
Teachers download and use a provided document to help them plan their writing instruction of notes, sentences, and summaries.
Suggestions for how to incorporate daily writing responses to reading are provided for each of the three writing categories.
Part 5: Wrap Up
Topic 1: Summary
Writing is a complex literacy skill. Teachers are asked to answer the following questions to review the information learned in Tool 8: Why is writing important? How does writing develop? How can we teach writing successfully?
Topic 2: Conversation with an Expert
Joan Sedita from Keys to Literacy speaks about the importance of teaching writing as a part of our reading lessons.