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Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading/Writing Workshop Journal

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.

2003-04 Reading/Writing
Workshop Journal
Week #29

Independent Inquiry Projects:
One Cure for Worksheet Addiction

Why not also consider doing some scaffolding for reception techniques? I first learned these from my WebQuesting days. Bernie Dodge has wonderful ideas out on his site. While most don't describe science directly, I do think that they begin to describe what I am thinking about when I say that there has to be something that we can build for our students that will help them deconstruct the process of receiving information.
If we begin to tear down the receiving of information into its component pieces then I think our worksheet-dependent students will learn each of those "skills." My example would be when I was teaching a lesson on observing leaves. All I could get out of them was drawings of balls and sticks with boring descriptive sentences. It was terrible. After being totally frustrated by the experience, I decided that I was terrible at teaching how to draw and write descriptive sentences. So I asked my art and English teacher for help.

We switched classes for a couple of days and I learned their lingo. By the time we were done, I knew the vocabulary of value, hue, line, adjectives, sentence combining, and the "hand of description." The quality of our science lab journals exponentially increased, and now I could focus on content. Our understanding of leaves could progress to size, shape, color variation, smooth or rough, simple or compound, and then to sinuses or lobes and other more sophisticated concepts.

I felt like a science teacher again as they searched through my leaf collection to find and draw and describe each variation on a theme. They loved the lab and augmented my collection with specimens they found outside of school.

Maybe I just need to think about how I could break things down a bit more. Bernie Dodge puts forth three kinds of scaffolding: reception, transformation to help them think things through, and then production so they can tell us what they learned. I think he's right on. I've used his three buckets for organizing the way I break down scaffolding ideas for my classroom activities. It's worked pretty well.

Weeks 4 to 6 -- Research and note taking continue. Students work on note-taking strategies and take notes on their questions. They add new questions as they arise and research those questions. Teacher continues teaching organizational and synthesizing strategies to support research efforts. Teacher confers with each student every week, a brief check-in if there isn't time for more. Teacher begins teaching writing strategies.

I'm using Carl Anderson's book, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers, to help me confer with our writers. In Chapter 1, "Conferences are Conversations," he discusses five characteristics of conferences:

--Conferences have a point to them.
--Conferences have a predictable structure.
--In conferences, we pursue lines of thinking with students.
--Teachers and students have conversational roles in conferences.
--In conferences, we show students we care about them. (p. 7)

While conferring, it helps me to remember that a conference is a conversation. He also discusses a two-part scenario for "The Structure of a Writing Conference."

--Conversation about the work the child is doing as a writer
--Conversation about how the child can be come a better writer (p. 17)

I purposely try to keep these two sections in mind. It helps me keep a focus on the "lines of thinking" I want to pursue with the kids, or "what might help this writer," and not get distracted with "what might help this writing."

During conferences, Anderson poses questions to students that provide a "predictable structure" for the conversation about writing. These questions are the way he cues kids to talk about their writing work. Here's what he says about the importance of repetition:

"In fact, I don't think it matters too much which opening lines I actually use, as long as they're open-ended-and that, over time I use them over and over again to start my conferences. It's the repetition that cues students to talk about their writing work, not the questions themselves." (p. 29)

Marshall Space Flight Center
NASA Kids: Space Science/Stars
"See fantastic images of the never-ending cycle of birth and death of stars."

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