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. Juli also
posts a weekly journal entry from her reading/writing classroom.
This year, Juli will focus on her efforts to integrate subject
matter into her reading and writing workshop approach. In her
first journal of the year, she explains the rationale behind this
move and some of her thinking about how she hopes to accomplish
this goal.
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.
We've got a new test. It's a standards based science assessment
and it's forcing us to rethink how we do things. In many ways,
it's about time we took a look at how we organize and plan in
order to "cover" everything we need to teach. It's more
and more apparent that every minute counts.
But we need to be careful. In The Understanding By Design Handbook,
McTighe and Wiggins discuss the issue of coverage. "Teachers
have to make difficult choices and priorities in instruction,"
they write on page 189. "All teaching, including coverage
teaching, involves deciding in part what not to teach or emphasize.
All teaching involves the feeling that possible and desirable
learnings are being sacrificed because of lack of time."
Integrating subject matter looks like the best idea as we watch
the assessments and requirements pile up during our back-to-school
meetings. So this year we'll bring more science into our Reading
and Writing Workshops with an emphasis on depth rather than just
covering the content.
While we're planning how we'll integrate science, reading, and
writing, I reviewed our prior experiences incorporating content
into Reading and Writing Workshop. Last year, we included a thematic
unit of study about "The Sun." (For more about this
unit, check out Writing Workshop Journals Week #29
and Week #30.) Based on materials developed
by NASA, it launched us into the realm of learning science through
reading and writing. Here's what I wrote at the beginning of the
unit:
The next step was to gather print resources-texts that kids can read and use to learn. Immersing ourselves in reading is an important first part of any unit of study in writing workshop. The idea for this thematic study is "that the walls between the two disciplines (reading and writing) will come down." So I looked for a variety of materials for kids to read during our shared thematic study of the Sun and Sunspots.
How much I learned about reading informational texts
during this unit of study!
In addition, two years ago I wrote a Reading Workshop Journal
(here) about "Leti's Search for Gold:
The Importance and Power of Nonfiction." I described how
Leti helped me learn the value of allowing students to follow
their academic interests.
Of all the readers in our Reading Workshop, Leti is the one most focused on what fascinates her -- the California Gold Rush. Why does she read nonfiction? "If schools are going to build a curriculum that supports a lifetime of nonfiction reading, the place to begin is by encouraging children to become avid learners and to bring their interests into the classroom," says Lucy Calkins in The Art of Teaching Reading (p. 440). That's what Leti is doing by reading about the Gold Rush, bringing her interests into the classroom.
Because of Leti I learned that encouraging kids to follow their
interests in content areas motivates them to do more with their
reading and writing. It really works.
Bringing everything together, our goal this year is to help our
struggling readers and writers develop content literacy while
they improve their reading and writing. As many teachers understand,
for middle school students, content literacy is essential. Writing
in Educational Leadership, Richard T. Vacca explains why
it's so important:
Content literacy is often defined as the level of reading and writing skill that learners need in an academic subject to comprehend and respond to ideas in texts used for instructional purposes. ("From Efficient Decoders to Strategic Readers," Educational Leadership, November 2002, p. 10)
That's what we want for our students as they move into middle
school--to be able to use reading and writing to learn academic
subjects. But first, we need to know more about them as readers
and writers. Consequently this next week, we'll start our authentic
assessments.
As Max says in Where the Wild Things Are, "Let the
wild rumpus begin!
Download Juli's curriculum plan for content literacy
Read next week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
Back to the Writing/Reading Workshop Index
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