Van Sluys Chapter on Invitations

Invitations help students "raise and pursue questions that are important to them and the world, and they need a supportive learning environment in which they are encouraged to ask about and respond to critical issues." (25) As teachers, we need to make time for invitations in our classroom. Through an invitation, the teacher gives students time to challenge ideas and meanings. Invitations will also help develop your students as literate people. Invitations have 4 common features: an initiating experience, a formally presented invitation, possible questions to pursue, and related resources. This is a great activity for your classroom because the investigation that these students are doing is based on their lives, and experiences. One item we need to remember is to make time for reflections. These reflections should be brief, but they give students a chance to write about their thoughts and reactions. I believe that invitations should definitely be apart of your classroom.

MGRP: Chapter 4 Poetry

This reading opened my eyes to using poetry in my classroom. As a child, I was never introduced to poetry, and this is probably why I was unaware that I could use this in my future classroom. Poetry evokes emotions quickly, and this could benefit you're classroom as a whole. As a teacher, one of your main goals is to create a community in the classroom. When you are introducing poetry, ask your students to share their favorite pieces of poetry. This helps the students sharing their ideas, and emotions to their classmates. This helps students start listening and appreciating others ideas. Most students write with experience, so poetry allows the teacher to have an insight of the experiences or ideas that are going on inside the child's head.

Overall, this reading helped me realize that you can use poetry when writing these large papers, and it helps build a community in your classroom.

The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an Urban Kindergarten Classroom

This journal was very interesting to me, and actually relates to my MGRP topic. This journal was inspiring to me because the teacher did not give up on her students just because of the area they were from. She took the notion of empowerment, and created a community in her classroom. "By combining children's natural world of play with real world events, we were able to embed a number of authentic reading and writing experiences in the literacy instructional program." (250) This project of the Donut house did just that. It helped students realize they are apart of their community, and can actually make a difference. Students were able to use language (verbal or writing) to interact with their classmates and also members of the community. At the end of the project, the students felt a sense of accomplishment.

MGRP Reading Chapters 1-3 & 6

This reading helped me understand the rationale for doing a Multigenre Research Paper. I never thought the idea of this paper was terrible, but this reading gave me motivation to complete this paper and really put effort into the genres I present. I like how Allen focused on how the entire paper's topic and genres were up to the writer. This was interesting to me because I am used to getting a topic and researching information that I am not interested in. The skills that the writer gains through writing a MGRP are incredible. "They need to learn how to think both analytically and divergently in order to reach goals, which they set for themselves." (9) This is neat for me to think about because you are creating your own boundaries while writing this paper. The sky is the limit!

Including the different genres in this project allows the students to write from many points of view. I think this is important because there might be many dimensions to their inquiry problem that can be shown in a number of ways.

Overall, I think this book will be helpful in writing this paper.

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.