Today was the first day that I had my students write about their reading in our read aloud. I asked them, “Is it possible for a child to change the society in which they live?” I got an array of responses, many of which impressed me.
Even though I was pleased with their responses, I know that doing a unit of study on writing about reading will help my students grow as both readers and writers. Hence, I’ve been talking with Kate about fashioning a unit like this (I taught it last year in NYC.) for our fourth graders this year. We’re thinking of putting it in when we do our Patricia Polacco Author Study in January.
Anyway, here are some thoughts I had on the subject of WRITING ABOUT READING:
Writing About Reading Can Be Done By:
-Jotting on Post-Its (in margins)
-Spending 5 minutes of free write time after you’ve finished the chapter.
-Write down your thinking after you’ve had a/the conversation (i.e., how your thinking changed after talking with your reading partner).
-T-charts
Next Steps:
– Ask kids to take a line of the text and then write off of that line.
–> Top of the page: write down the line of the text verbatim.
–> Beneath the line: the child responds.
– Writing about reading should be introduced during the read-aloud.
–> Can be done as a shared writing piece.
–> Then they can go off and do it on their own (in their reader’s notebooks).
–> Ask them to do the responses for homework. Then bring it into the conversation the next day.
How do you get readers to grow their ideas about books in writing in your classroom? Please share your thoughts by commenting.
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Students learning to respond to writing is so important. I have my students do reading response logs each week; of course, you do have to model how students should respond–if not you’ll get summary and all sorts of stuff you don’t want. I also do a silent response log for in class assignments periodically that way I can see what the students can do on their own without parental help.
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My students use their reading journals to write to me about the things they are reading independently. We write letters back and forth. They tell me what is happening in the book, and I ask leading questions to get them to think more. This is a chance for me to really respond to them personally, and to keep track of what they are enjoying and hating in their reading. I just printed off a copy of Maya Angelou’s “I Love the Look of Words” to put in one student’s journal because she has been commenting on how she enjoys big letters and funny fonts. I love having a personal interaction with each child. I teach grades 3 and 4, and the kids become surprisingly insightful in their journals with little prompting from me, and it motivates them to read during SSR.
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I like that idea where you write a line and then the student responds underneath it. I am going to work on that.
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We are noticing how characters change across a book. We began with pairs looking at the dad in
“The Bat Boy and His Violin.” First, the kids recorded what they noticed about the dad in this mentor text.
Then, then wrote thier thoughts about what they noticed. They were able to discuss how the dad’s thinking changed across the text, and why.
Now, they are ready to apply this strategy of tracking a character across a book to their own independent books.
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Perfect timing! I just started our lessons about writing about reading. We used sticky notes for the first time today and will be working our way up to letter-essays, taken from Atwell’s “The Reading Zone”. I’ll be watching these comments with interest.
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I use an elements chart. It is blocked into six squares on a white construction paper. The kids label them Visualizing, Characters, Questions, Important Ideas, Predictions, Opinions…
They usually will do three or four of these for a book during our read aloud. After our discussion we will take time to fill these out afterwards. We will then begin discussion with theses charts the next day. After the second chart I will have the students write in their readers journals about what they have noticed in their charts.. thoughts, opinions, or what they have learned about the story. It is nice, because I can connect these to strategy uses during our mini lessons, or responding to our reading, and then to our book club times.
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