Jamis Week 8 Post

In the beginning of Tompkins, Facilitating Students’ Comprehension: Text Factors there were different ways described in which students begin learning and different comprehension strategies. I have noticed that KWL charts work well. This is a great way for you to figure out what your students know and what they don’t know. It then discusses having student write in their learning logs. I also think this a great because it lets students reflect back on what they had just done, without having to talk in front of the class. In placement my students have a writing journal, but they just use it in their free time. I think it would be useful for students to use their journals to write questions and analyze their work. I also think that writing groups would be very useful to have in the classroom. These writing groups are used for proof reading of others work and revising. This is helpful for students because it lets them catch others mistakes while having to recognize what the mistakes are.

There was also another section describing stories consisting of a beginning, middle, and end. In placement my students are currently working on stories and how to write them. We have a writing specialist who comes in and works with the children. She said that it is never good to have the students (when they are first learning to write stories) do the entire thing. You should start out with the beginning and have them work on that, and that only. The entire week you should have students writing beginning of stories describing to them how to do it, what kinds of words need to be used (nouns, verbs, etc.), and have them draw a picture of the beginning part of the story. This lady brought in different colored paper with nouns and verb; nouns were purple and verbs were green. When the students used either a noun or a verb they used the corresponding colored pen. These lists had a selection of words for students to use so they don’t spend the entire time writing trying to think of words. This was a great idea because there are so many times where I find the students just sitting and trying to think of a specific word, or how to spell it. With the sheets they know both and can’t waste time. The following week you work on middles of stories and then the week after that the end. Once students have all of the beginning, middle, and ends complete; they can form their own story with all of the components. I have to get more information on this technique because it is new to our school, but I thought it was great.

Veronica's comment: I am glad that this chapter started with the class using a KWL chart and later followed up explaining what it was and how it is beneficial in the classroom. I was not aware what a KWL chart was until someone mentioned it in our Social Studies methods class. As these are used in classrooms, it would be great to make a big KWL chart and display it in the hallway. This way, parents and visitors can see what the students are studying and what information they have found. Frequent writing promotes fluent writers, so essentially your CT wants her students to use this journal as an opportunity for unassisted practice of writing.
What a great opportunity your class is experiencing to have someone come in and help them with story writing. I know that young learners have the tendency to want to tell stories but at times they have no correlation to what the teacher is discussing, or these stories seem to have no end. Your second graders are now able to see the steps they must take to develop a story that has details and a plot. I wonder if the students are having trouble piecing together the information? Do they start one story at the beginning and change it to another one at mid story?