Fluency Lesson Plan with Incorporation of writing:
I taught a fluency lesson dealing with accuracy and rate. This is mainly for reading, but helps when students write out words by rereading their work making sure it makes sense.
This is an activity a group of students using drawing and writing that was completed after learning about the differences between the four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall.
Blog on Incorporating Digital Writing into a Lesson:
This is a blog I made that has a couple of different ways to incorporate digital writing use in the classroom. This is used to help students use another of tool to help them write or show their writing in a unique way.
I wrote a piece of writing on what my Literacy life was like growing up. It starts out when I was in Pre-Kindergarten and explains my experiences with literacy all the way up to College. It also discusses the way I will use what I learned in my past into my future classroom regarding reading and writing.
In school, students are not given the right material in order to write an assignment. They are not given specific instructions or examples of what they need to do when writing a paper or any writing assignment. Teachers are vague and give broad guidelines to an assignment. Students need explicit directions in order to complete a task correctly. They can only learn when told how to do tasks, and what to do. Fowler explains, “if the directions are too vague or hardly understandable, the person being instructed tend to do the wrong processes” (2009). This helps to make a point that we do not want our students to do the task wrong, especially for digital writing. Teachers need to begin with thoroughly explaining the directions and model how to do it by showing examples.
My Personal Experience
In the past, I have been given poor directions on how to write. It has has improved over the years, but I did not know how to write until I got to college. I knew the basics, but my sentences were wordy, and had plenty of grammatical errors. As I desire to teach my students how to write, I will use a technique that gives them detailed directions, lots of examples, and space to write or draw. We as a class will create a scrapbook that is only meant for writing. It will consist of writing about a topic I give them; either dealing with learning how to spell to writing sentences using grammatical skills such as commas semicolons, etc. It can be used to explain a topic about another subject. The scrapbook use online, or in hand, will be utilized to show writing progress and for projects, using a smaller, separate book. Projects could be created to show to the class and teacher using different representations of images. If it were an online project, students could use a power point to explain their project having audio text, videos, pictures, drawings and more.
Tying Texts to New Ideas
Hicks quotes Dana Wilber saying, “students are learning to create texts that are very different from the linear, written, paper-based text that schools depend on” (page 30). By using a scrapbook, online or not, it gives permission to the students to think outside of the box in order to get their point across to their audience. Hicks makes a lot of points about giving lee way for them to think freely and let their minds do the work, not the teacher giving them directions how to make it look like the exact way they want it. If the teacher did that, then they would all look the same. It is good to have the same guidelines, but different ideas. Different ideas come from all students because no student is the same compared to others.
Connections to the Future
This connects to my experience with writing because I was either given strict directions or not given enough to complete my digital writing project. In the future, my sole purpose is to have students think outside of the box while having certain requirements and directions to keep everybody on the same page. Also, I will provide them with instructions to discuss the main points of what I am looking for from them. Overall digital writing takes practice, guidance, and good instruction.
Writing is based on grammar and how to use it. Every single person is a different writer, so teaching them different techniques will help them develop skills to write more detailed and professional. Their audience is the professor, future employers, and the classmates. The sole purpose is to demonstrate an understanding of teaching digital writing and creating it. An example could be a power point that includes audio, text, images, and audio reading. The main situation is reflecting over personal writing styles as well as teaching what we learned from Hicks: know how and when to use certain tools and more.
posted by Madeline Miller in Uncategorized and having Comments Off on Notes on teaching writing and ideas on writing
*Mrs. Tate explains the assignment thinking it is going to be successful grade wise and interest wise*
Mrs. Tate: “Since this is an Environmental Science Class, we are going to write an essay about trees.”
Tim:” I love trees, but why can’t we do something more fun with the topic?”
Tim is having a hard staying on task when he writes. He finds it boring to sit at his desk or at home to write. He likes to see pictures and visuals to intrigue his audience viewing his work.
As Mrs. Tate grades his paper, she notices that his work is very repetitive and not as detailed as she hoped for. She has past documentation of his mediocre work he has done. She wonders if this is the best form of assessment she needs to test their knowledge on the topic they are finishing up. Mrs. Tate thought about switching the assignment to see if their performance of the assessment would improve or make a difference.
The next day, Mrs. Tate had an announcement. “All right class, so after I graded all of your papers, I have decided to assign another assignment. You all will be creating a power point presentation on what ya’ll have learned from this lesson about trees.”
Tim says quietly to himself, “I am so excited, this is going to be way more fun than that paper.”
Tim happily spends time working on his power point. He says to himself, ” I cannot wait to show people what my power point!”
On the day of presentations, Tim proudly showed what he learned about trees. His teacher saw his progress from the essay to the power point, and recognized how much more information and description he used to prove what he knew about the topic. Mrs. Tate compared the classes scores and learned a lesson to have students complete more interesting and eye appealing assignments to be able to see how well the students learned the subject.
posted by Madeline Miller in Uncategorized and having Comments Off on Powerpoint, no paper!
