Crafting Writers Chapter 10-12

I thought this reading assignment was extremely interesting, and very beneficial to me as a future teacher. These chapters focused on how to set up conferences with your students and how to focus on what you can teach them during the conference and what they can do in the future to work on the for the next conference. A idea Hale mentioned was to create student conference sheets that they can put in their writers notebooks. This will help remind the students of what they know and what they can work on during their in-class writings. Chapter 11 discussed how you can set up your classroom to help the flow of writing in the classroom. To have a writing station will help students take writing more seriously which is what students in the elementary grades need. As teachers we need to remember to not only criticize in these conferences. If we tell the student a few things that we think their doing well, they will most likely pay attention when you are giving them criticism.

Crafting Writers Chapters 7-9

I enjoyed reading these three chapters. I feel like I learned a lot that I personally do not remember doing in Elementary school. Chapter 7: Teaching Craft Lessons was my favorite chapter out of the three. I liked how Hale explained mini lessons on she personally does them in her classroom. This helped me brainstorm ideas of what I would want to do in my classroom. This was extremely helpful to me. I also liked her idea of Live Writing. I loved when my teachers would write on the overhead because I felt that it was more interesting. The children definitely interact more with other students and the teacher when they are all participating to write a paragraph on the overhead. I also like how she focused on conferences. I never remember having conferences with my teachers about my writing, so this is an item I would love to implement in my classroom. Hale gave us some small things that she practices in her classroom, but it wasn't overbearing and telling us what to do.

In chapter 8, I liked how she pointed out to find strengths in students writings. Let them share their quick-write in front of the class, use their writing as an example. Make them want to take ownership of their work! Having them interacting with others and their writing is extremely beneficial to the students. If the student is starting to implement a craft that was a weak spot for them, tell them that you notice they are starting to use that craft in their writing. We need to intrinsically motivate these students, especially in their writing. They need to be motivated to share their feelings, thoughts, emotions, etc.

In chapter 9, I liked how it set up items the teacher could talk about with students in future conferences based on prior conferences. You have to be the final one who makes the decision of what to teach, but Hale gave useful hints that can help you plan future conferences/lessons.

Overall, I thought that the majority of this reading was useful to me.

Chapter 4 & 5: Crafting Writers

I learned a lot when reading these two chapters. In the Categories of Specific Craft, this talked about the specific crafts we could do that would help our students access more words through their writing and reading. As teachers, we need to offer support to our students, and help them along the way. In this chapter, they wrote about the 5 themes in teaching the craft writing. These were the 5 senses, show not tell, dialogue, sentence variety, and word choice. The one that I found the most interesting was the 5 senses crafts. I remember trying to write with my senses, and I know that this activity can dramatically change the writing of your students. What I liked about using this craft is that it can help all types of learners. If there are some students that are more advanced, they can work on more advanced crafts that will challenge those students. In Chapter 5, I learned that not only can teachers create workshops about punctuation, but we can explore punctuation through literature. As a teacher, you could give students examples of sentences, and the students can mention why they used the certain punctuation. I think this would be extremely beneficial to many students.