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Home : 2008 : Aug : 8
Why Think BIG? By integrating our reading and writing curriculums, we can deliver efficient, meaningful, and rich instruction: Efficient: We all feel the crunch. We have so many books to read, so little time. So many authors and genres and series to expose the children to, so many skills and strategies to scaffold, so many celebrations to hold. Even though efficiency is the least important reason on my list, it cannot be minimalized. By packaging reading and writing as one combined curriculum, we are bound to gain time for deeper conversations, longer thinking time, wider reading and writing opportunities. The time we gain can be put, not towards cramming more in, but towards digging deeper. Meaningful: We are teaching children to be literate, intelligent, thinking individuals. If we wish to nurture children who do not simply excel at filling in worksheets and answering end of the chapter questions, our instruction has to match the desired outcome. The desired outcome is a student who autonomously wonders, connects, envisions, infers, synthesizes. It’s going to take some powerfully authentic, deeply thought-out instruction to achieve an outcome like that in just one year. Fortunately for us, we know that in excellent teaching (no matter the subject), the most retention, application, and extension happens when children make connections. Why make it difficult on them? Why teach them to infer what the author does not explicitly say one month, and then in a separate time and place, ask them to be the writer who shows, not tells? If we don’t find the connections ourselves first, the children won’t find them either. And if they do find them, it won’t be to their maximum benefit; it’ll be more of Keene’s “happy accidents.” We want to squeeze every last bit of teaching time we can muster from our hectic days. Connecting reading and writing isn’t the same as 1+1=2, because when they are combined, the impact they make as one entity is a force unto itself ... therefore, 1 + 1 = 3. (This isn’t math we’re talking about, so I’m taking creative license.) You think you saw lightbulbs going off at the beginning of your reading and writing workshop journey? Wait until you see what larger literacy themes kids will construct if only given the chance. Rich: Talk about creating a literary history together. The Relatives Came becomes the centerpiece for a reading and writing unit as children feel the power that comes only by making a real and relevant text to self connection and then, with hardly a second thought, examine the book as a writer, striving to write a piece that, like Rylant’s work, is so purely and honestly crafted that surely any reader can and will connect with it. Owl Moon conjures mental images so cold, that the children can feel the wet warmth of the scarves over their own mouths and, again with hardly a second thought, write poetry that solicits the same effect in their readers. Teaching reading and writing as if they always have been and always will be two sides of the same coin, conditions children to apply their learning from one to the other with hardly a second thought. Weaving reading and writing together by letting our language slip with smooth familiarity between the two, communicates to children that they are one, infinitely rich process—to even attempt to tease them apart, compartmentalizing them in neat boxes, is a futile act. How to Think BIG: Sure- we know it would be nice if we could merge our reading and writing, but how? It’s not as easy as it seems. For more information on the topic, read Leah Mermelstein’s K-2 Reading and Writing Connections. It was her book that helped me stretch my thinking in this area. Other than that, here are some suggestions: Think big. Think in terms of the bigger literacy concepts first, then lay out the strategies and skills that fall under them. Just for fun, see what would happen if you didn’t structure your reading unit around only one skill. In writing, we don’t tend to structure the whole unit around only one skill, but in reading we do. Try naming your units as genres or even authors or story parts (like character study). You may still be able to keep your reading strategies in tact, but naming the unit something bigger will allow you to tie that reading strategy with the writing ones. Make a model. If you’re a concrete person, physically lay out the skills and/or units you want to teach. On blue index cards, write strategies and skills you want to cover in reading. Besides the big six strategies, cards might also read: retelling, fluency strategies, or character study. On yellow index cards, write your writing units. Really, you should write the skills and strategies for writing, just as we do for reading—we tend to think in units because many of us use Lucy Calkins. But you’ll want to break the strategies out on the cards because it could help you with matching later. For example, on the Writing for Readers card, you might bullet the main skills of spelling strategies and punctuation (and later that will help you match spelling to decoding strategies). Finally, play the matching game! Use green cards to title matches. Again: Not as easy as it seems. Sometimes- when you’re lucky- a writing unit could become the title of the entire unit. Sometimes, you’ll put two things together but have to marry them by a genre or author. Keep in mind that you’re matching r & w strategies and skills that are sometimes sort of inverted. Like encoding vs. decoding, making mental images vs. writing imagery, inferring vs. showing, not telling, synthesis vs. revision. So actually, the title of the unit becomes pretty important because it is the link. It makes the connections between reading and writing transparent for the kids. Don’t get hung up on matching every single r & w skill because even though reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, they are not the same, and some of the processes are different. Leah Mermelstein has a chapter in her book that breaks down where reading and writing are the same, but also where they differ. Be sure not to cut something out because it doesn’t have a match. Work flexibly from reading to writing OR from writing to reading. In other words, don’t worry if in some months, the writing drives the reading while in other months, it’s the other way around. When I did my first integrated plans last year, I found that writing drove the reading in quite a few months because I had the Units of Study and I wanted to keep some of them. So, Writing for Readers would naturally call for a conventions/accuracy unit in reading. Renaming the whole thing “Accuracy” logically ties in with the goals of both reading and writing. On the other hand, a reading nonfiction unit might be the driving factor for a writing nonfiction unit. Frontload with specific texts and authors. Knowing your units ahead of time will allow you to systematically introduce kids to authors and key books much earlier than the unit comes up. If you know that you’ll study Langston Hughes when you teach kids how to infer in poetry, you can spend earlier months reveling in his word choices. If you know that Voices in the Park will be used later to discuss perspective, you can let the kids puzzle through how the book actually works in your earlier questioning unit. Going to study Cynthia Rylant later? Use The Relatives Came heavily in Small Moments so that when you introduce her as a mentor, all the kids have a feeling of “I know her, and she’s going to be a good teacher!” Ask yourself “What kind of reading skills or strategies does writing such as this require?” OR “What reading strategy requires the same kind of work as this writing strategy?” when trying to move from a writing unit to a reading unit. Don’t forget—we’re not just matching writing unit titles to reading strategies. Go deeper than that. If you’ve written the basic skills or strategies that go with each writing unit on the card, you can ask yourself the above questions. For example, when children revise, they are changing and rewriting their original thoughts to more accurately and effectively reflect their goals. In the same way, when children synthesize in reading, they are changing and revising their thinking to make something new. Those two units could go together. Synthesis could also pair up with a student-led research writing unit because synthesis is a necessary strategy that writers use when they are determining what to include. (To figure out those two options, I asked myself the second question.) Another example: if you are working with a nonfiction writing unit in which you expect children to create all-about books, ask yourself the first question. The answer: in order to read a book that is organized by subtitles and chapters, a reader must determine importance. Actually more important is that as a writer, the children are determining importance as they decide what will go in every chapter and section. I hope you can see that it’s more than simply matching up the nonfiction writing unit with the “nonfiction reading strategy” of determining importance. You need to think through why and how they go together by exploring what lies under these concepts. Give yourself a break if this is your first year teaching either reader’s or writer’s workshop the whole way through. It’s pretty necessary that you concentrate on teaching either reading or writing well before trying to imagine how they can jigsaw. Surely there are many ways to think about marrying our reading and writing instruction. But I hope that these tips will guide you if you’re in the beginning stages of this work, as I am. Even if you’re not ready to make the full leap of reorganizing your whole curriculum, pausing to think about the underpinnings of these processes we so faithfully teach, will come out in your daily interactions with children… and they will be better for it!
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