This is our second mini-lesson focusing on a drafting strategy. As part of our focus on significance, I teach the students that visualizing actions before writing them down is one strategy for giving the reader enough details to understand the story. I demonstrate the teaching point and, in later clips, give students an opportunity to try the strategy before independent work.
Students at different stages of writing
As writers, we are always trying to make our messages clear for the reader. My students generally have a very good understanding that readers read for meaning. Because of this, I think they understand that the purpose of careful thinking while writing is meant to support the reader in making-meaning. I hope to help all students see how visualization can be used ANY TIME they are writing and want to elaborate on their ideas - regardless of their stage in sketching or drafting. I attempt to make this clear by encouraging students during the active involvement portion of the lesson to find any part of their work to stretch out. While some students may have needed more support to pinpoint specific events to stretch, most children had a good grasp of their main events because of our planning sessions.
Thinking about my students' learning styles
While thinking about my students' needs as writers, I also want to consider their learning styles. Second graders benefit from concrete examples, particularly students who are learning English and visual and tactile learners.
I intentionally planned all of the following as ways to support different learners.
Connecting the work to the students
I do not always spend this length of time on the "connection" portion of the mini-lesson, but so much of our reading work supported this particular strategy and I wanted students to see the connection between their strategy work in reading and writing. Also, as they began the very important work of drafting, I wanted to emphasize the importance, at this stage, of conveying meaning to the reader - of helping the reader understand the message.
While I realize that every student will not adopt visualization a strategy, I knew that I in future days I would be using the same strategy to support students in adding more details, and would be able to present the lesson in a different way.
| TEACHER: | Good morning writers. |
| [all] | Good morning Miss Rothman. |
| TEACHER: |
Yesterday after you went home I sat down and I opened your folders and I read through your books. And I have to say I was hooked because the leads me my want to read more and for those of you who are still sketching, I can't wait to see the words that go on those pages today. I am so excited and I have to compliment you. I could tell by the way you wrote your leads and do your sketches that you really took time to imagine the scene that was happening at the beginning of your story. You imagined characters and you imagined setting. Great work, writers.
And so now many of you are ready to start going towards the middle of your story, towards those important parts. And so I was thinking, well, what can I teach the writers today? So I thought about our readers workshop and how we've been talking a lot about visualizing. And I thought, well, the reason that we visualize is so that we can really understand the stories we're reading. And we did that today in readers workshop and we've explored other ways that authors, including our class and our class books, have really stretched out the details and the actions in the important parts so that we can understand what the story is all about. And since we are writing books that are very important and special to us, it's important that the people that are reading our stories that we're writing really have a good picture in their mind of what's going on in our stories so they can understand them. And so today I'm going to teach you that one day the writers help their readers to understand the books [inaudible] and to make pictures in their minds, is eye stopping and visualizing actions while they're writing. Somebody might be thinking that sounds pretty familiar, to stop and think while we're reading. It's the same kind of strategy. Stop and visualize is kind of like stop and think in reading. So I'm going to show you how I did this yesterday with my piece after you went home, okay, because I've been working on my piece, remember? So I want you to watch while I show you how I stop and visualize the actions and put them into my story. |