The Sound of Silence: Reflective Practice

A Backstory

It was a regular Tuesday morning and I was starting a new “how-to” writing unit with a group of kindergarteners. My supervisor was due to come in to observe me, and I was feeling confident because I was prepared and ready to go. The mini lesson went well and my students were generally attentive, engaged, and participating. Things were looking good!

When it was time for my students to go off to write independently, the room got terribly quiet. All of a sudden my typically chatty and rambunctious bunch was so silent you could hear a pin drop. I looked at the kids who were getting straight to work, their flair pens going strong. I looked at my supervisor who was looking at the kids, wondering if she thought this was a good thing or not. I looked back at the kids who were still so quiet and still, and all I heard was the whirring sound of the air purifier. What on earth was going on?

While I do value a calm writing environment for my students, it makes me a little uneasy when the room is totally silent. For young children who are learning to write, talking is at the heart of putting the pieces of the writing process together. When I walk around the room, I tend to pay attention first to what I hear. Are students talking about their writing or is their talk off topic? As long as it’s productive talk, I encourage talking throughout the independent practice time.

Phew! Within a few minutes, my unusually quiet students started talking–quite a lot. Some were talking to each other, while others were talking out loud to themselves. I could hear children stretching out words to sound them out, asking a neighbor whether or not a word was on the word wall, and excitedly sharing their cool ideas. I settled in at a table and began initiating talk with a child who seemed to need some direction. I felt a sense of relief as the room went from awkward silence to a jubilant yet purposeful buzz.

The Details

For anyone who has worked in an early childhood classroom, you know that it is rarely if ever silent. Writing time is no exception. As children bridge the gap from having ideas in their head to drawing pictures of their ideas, to coming up with sentences that consist of letters and words, to rereading and understanding their own writing, they absolutely need to talk it out!

Below are some of the most common kinds of talk that I encounter and encourage in my kindergarten classroom:

• Oral rehearsal: It can be really tricky for young children to hold onto a sentence in their mind long enough for them to write it down. Oral rehearsal means that they say their sentence out loud to a classmate or to a teacher who them repeats it back to them. This helps the writer recall the words they want to write so that they can get them down on the page before they forget.
• Stretching out words to hear all the sounds: As kindergarteners are learning to match letters with sounds, it helps when they can slow down and enunciate a tricky word so that they can hear and feel the sounds with their own ears and mouth. I know a writer is working hard when I hear them stretching out a word. It also inspires their peers to try it too.
• Rereading from the beginning: Sometimes when I confer with a student I ask them to reread their work from the beginning. I want to know if they can read their own writing, and if not, encourage them to edit and change it on the spot. It also helps them notice when their writing does not make sense. Sometimes a student will come up to me and say, “What word did I write?” I’ll tell them, “Start at the beginning and reread what you wrote to me. Let’s see if you can figure it out.” Usually this helps them decipher it within the context of their own work.
• Elaboration: It is much easier for young children to verbally elaborate on their ideas than it is for them to write them all down. While I always encourage children to add more details when they can, I also pay attention to the way they speak about their their ideas to me or one another during the writing process. This is valuable information for me and something that I can use to help support them to write more when they are ready.
• Show and tell: Kids love to spontaneously show each other their work even when the goal is to be writing. While I never want this sharing to be at the expense of another child’s writing time, there is always something valuable to be gained from two children sitting together and engaging with a text that one of them has written.

One Thing to Remember

While I benefit from a quiet space in order to think and get my own work done, I know that my students benefit from the social nature of talking while writing. Until writing becomes more automatic, they typically need to say their ideas out loud before they can write them. I tend to be more concerned about my students who sit silently than I do about the ones who are constantly talking. As long as their talk is purposeful and interspersed with moments of quiet focus and attention, I know that the talk is helping them transfer their ideas from their mind to their page.