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.
It's a wrap!
We've finished our unit of literature study about informational
text, and it's time to find out what the kids think.
So how does doing literature study with informational text make
us better readers?
Based on the end of the unit survey for literature study with
informational text that I give to the kids, there are lots
of reasons why literature is important, and some of them even
have to do with reading! Here are the questions from the "Literature
Study Survey" I created, along with some of their responses.
(Download a PDF version
of the survey.)
Expanding reading comprehension strategies
1. When you were working in your literature study group,
what connections did you make?
Viviana: "When I was reading the book of whales I had
a connection. Text to text because when we were reading the book
of whales we went on the internet with the tuna fish and the dolphins
in the nets."
Michelle: "Mrs. Frizzle found fossils on the ground and we
have fossils in our world."
Daniel T.: "That the Queen Mary has lifeboats like the Titanic."
Learning to think critically
2. What did you learn from your book that was interesting?
Jeannie: "That shale is a mud that forms into a rock."
Viviana: "I learned a new word p; that was migrate and
it means to move from one place to another."
Yaritza: "That hundreds of people were on the Titanic and
died."
Daniel T.: "That they find the Titanic under water."
Loren: "I learned that in the Titanic they had a swimming
pool, grand staircase, dining room and cabin."
Rin: "T-rex head weighed 1 ton. 1 ton is 2,000 pounds."
3. How did it change what you thought about the topic of the
book?
Vanessa: "I thought that they couldn't find the Titanic
and then they did."
Daniel T.: "I thought the Titanic was lost."
Daniel C.: "I thought that no one survived but they did."
Jonathan: "I thought that Sue, the t-rex, was going to hide
forever."
Helen: "I thought dinosaurs were boring but now it's great.
I love dinosaur books."
Appreciating the aesthetic qualities of literature
4. What did you enjoy about the writing in your book?
Jeannie: "Learning about fossils."
Vanessa: "What I enjoyed is that they talked about the pictures."
Viviana: "I enjoy the glossary and the glossary tells you
what it means."
Michelle: "They talked about rocks."
Helen: "Most authors don't put themselves in the book but
she did."
Daniel T.: "That the writing is easy to understand."
Joanne: "I enjoyed everything because I had connections and
questions and everything."
5. What problems did you learn about in the book?
Viviana: "The whales are in great danger of becoming
extinct like the dinosaurs."
Astrick: "About the heart"
Rin: "It was so hot and they had to dig down." (When
they were excavating the t-rex skeleton during the summer)
Edgar: "Dinosaurs are reptiles. Reptiles never stop growing."
6. What did you visualize (making pictures in your mind) as
you were reading?
Jeannie: "Nothing much!"
Viviana: "I visualize that I was on top of a whale."
Vanessa: "When the Titanic was sinking" (almost everyone
who read the book about the Titanic visualized this scene)
Rin: "I was making pictures in my mind about bad dinosaurs
eating good dinosaurs."
Developing communication skills
7. How did the people in your group show that they were
good listeners?
Jeannie: "By asking questions and making connections"
Viviana: "They were looking at me when I was talking."
8. When your group was talking about the book, what did you
do when people disagreed?
Jeannie: "No one disagreed." (Almost everyone responded
similarly)
9. How did you find ways to agree?
Jeannie: "by talking together"
Michelle: "We found the right answer together."
Extending writing skills
10. How have reading and talking about your literature
study book made you a better writer?
Sokunteer: "I want to write about Sue, the largest t-rex
they ever found."
Jeannie: "by asking questions"
Vivana: "It helped me by looking at the pictures of the whale."
Loren: "By reading and visualizing it helped me."
Joanne: "By writing questions and connections on a sticky
note."
What do you want to change about literature study?
Jonathan: "The word literature because kids didn't
know the word."
Helen: "No writing."
Joanne: "Nothing!!"
What kinds of books do you want to read in literature study?
Whales - 3
"A Series of Unfortunate Events"
Geography - 2
Biography - 3
Encyclopedia - 2
More Titanic books - 7
History
Any dinosaur book - 4
SEE Juli's Curriculum Map
for Content Literacy - Unit Three
BONUS: Juli's schedule
for Literature Study
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
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