Juli Kendall's Weekly
Writing Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers
are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about
supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion.
Last year, Juli kept a weekly journal from her Reading Workshop.
This year, Juli is continuing her journals, but this time she's focusing
on her Writing Workshop. Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing
Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals,
find out how here.
Writing Workshop
Week #31:
The Million-Dollar Question:
How Do We Connect Reading and Writing?
So, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" You've watched the contestants
on TV take their chances, now it's your turn. Answer the big question correctly,
and you win. For our Writing Workshop, the million-dollar question, the
really valuable one, is this: What's the connection between reading and
writing?
As a place to start answering this question, I'm using what I already know
about the relationship between reading and writing to ground my thinking.
The more I read, the better I get at reading.
The more I write, the better I get at writing.
When I do a lot of reading, it makes it easier to do writing. (Reading Workshop
Journal #8)
Mentor authors help me write. (Writing Workshop Journals #26
and #27)
I learn about writing by "reading like a writer." (Writing Workshop
Journal #10)
Reading a really good book makes me want to have a conversation about the
writing. (Reading Workshop Journals #16 and #17)
Immersing ourselves in reading a genre before we write helps us understand
it better. (Writing Workshop Journal #15)
We need to see ourselves reflected in our reading. (Reading Workshop Journal
#18)
Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly
Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights by Jon Winokur, compiler,
is giving me additional insights into our question about reading and writing
connections.
"Read and revise, reread and revise, keep reading and
revising until your text seems adequate to your thought." Jacques
Barzun
"Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them
the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds."
Ursula K. LeGuin
"You can't write fiction unless you read fiction." Bill
Adler
Right now, we're discovering answers to this question by making our own
connections between reading and writing during this unit of study in Writing
Workshop. I'm asking kids "to read and write within the same genre
and across both the reading and writing workshop." While I'm taking
advantage of this time to "invite young people into the life of poetry,"
Georgia Heard is guiding and energizing our journey. Although she's written
several books, my favorite is Awakening the Heart, Exploring Poetry in
Elementary and Middle School. She believes that poetry lives in all
of us.
We all have poetry inside of us, and I believe that poetry is
for everyone, but can we recognize it when we hear it, in our students and
in ourselves? Sometimes it disguises itself, it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't
sound like limerick, so we have to look for it in unlikely places. M. L.
Rosenthal said, "There is so much poetry present in the voices of people
to whom it would hardly occur that this could be so. The way we speak in
unselfconscious moments is the very stuff of poetry." The way we speak
to our loved ones every day and night: when you tuck your children into
bed; the first thing you say to your spouse or partner when you wake up
in the morning. When we speak in a voice that's exclusively ours, that's
natural, when we're not trying to be anything other than ourselves, that's
the stuff of poetry. (p. xv)
Concentrating on poetry as a way to learn more about connections between
reading and writing, we're meeting in poetry partnerships. Working in pairs,
first, as readers, and then as writers, we're reading and talking about
poems and "how the authors wrote these texts." Then, the kids
will write some of their own poems and have a chance to "read, post-it,
talk about, and reread texts that students, including themselves, have written."
(Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop Curricular Calendar)
At the same time, "reading poems like writers," we're watching
to see how poets craft their work. Our discussions center on what the purposes
might be for these poets as they weave their poems together-how do poets
make their decisions?
As we read and talk and write about poetry, we're also building powerful
connections between reading and writing. We're asking kids to read and write
within a particular genre to make their own connections. As they read and
respond to their work and the work of their peers, it helps our writers
"become newly invested in their own work and equips them to do a richer,
deeper kind of revision than before." (Revision is the next unit of
study in Writing Workshop.)
I've assembled a collection of poems for everyone to read together during
our immersion phase. Following up on our thematic unit of study about the
Sun (Journals #29 and #30),
I'm including some poems with a science theme. Although we're reading all
kinds of poems, these science ones are especially fun. To give a feel for
this experience, here are some excepts from our Poetry packet:
Sun
Space
is afire
with bursts of bubbling gas,
colliding atoms, boiling wells
and solar flares
spewing
from a burning star, the sun.
From Space Songs by Myra Cohn Livingston, illustrated by Leonard
Everett Fisher
"Why Does the Sun Shine?"
The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is built into Helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives
Performed by They Might Be Giants, written by Lou Singer and Hy Zaret,
1959
Lyrics -- http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/whysunshine.htm
Music -- http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/
(Thanks to MWProjects listserv member Leah Oppenheim for this tip!)
If you're interested in more poems and songs with a science theme, try http://www.pagecreations.com/astrocappella/
Here's just a taste of "Sun Song."
Our star, the Sun is a big ball of gas
And it's 99 percent of our solar system's mass
It's an average star in our Milky Way
Warming the Earth every day
What powers our Sun and makes it so bright?
Come on and tell me, what makes all that light?
Hans Bethe long ago reached the conclusion
It changes Hydrogen to Helium by nuclear fusion
When fusion takes place light is created
And it makes its way out (although rather belated)
Through the Photosphere that's the part that we see
The light comes out and shines on you and me
(Special thanks to MWlist member Charlie Lindgren)
But we aren't just looking at poems about the Sun. We're exploring all kinds
of poetry. We're also reading:
The Dreamkeeper and Other Poems by Langston Hughes
Going Over to Your Place by Paul Janeczko
Hey You! C'Mere: A Poetry Slam by Elizabeth Swados
Honey I Love, and Other Love Poems by Eloise Greenfield
I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You by Naomi Shihab Nye
Poetspeak by Paul Janeczko
Pterodactyls and Pizza edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Sky Scrape, City Scape: Poems of City Life by Jane Yolen
Spectacular Science: A Book of Poems edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Sweetcorn by James Stevenson
This Same Sky, poems selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
Now, do you have a "final answer" to our million-dollar question
-- What's the connection between reading and writing?
Or, do you want to use one of your "lifelines?"
Next week: Kids working in poetry partnerships to make their own
connections
Download Juli's Curricular
Calendar #10 (reading & writing connections) for Writing Workshop
Download a comparison of Juli's Reading
and Writing Workshop plans
Read next week's journal
Read last week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
Back to the Writing/Reading Workshop Index Page