LIT 102 Task #1 Blog

 Essentials of  Teaching Writing  To ensure that students are fully supported as it pertains to their writing, certain essential opportunities must be given to the students to promote effective writing and to develop their craft of writing pieces that are worthy to be published.  Firstly, Children need adequate time to write. As we know, writing is a process and a journey from ideas to publish work. If we take the time to look into the efforts made to create and publish a book by well-known authors, we will see that there are many stages a piece of writing has to go through before reaching the final stage. So too, our children need to be given fair chances for them to develop their pieces of writing. One may ask, how can writing time be added to students' schedules? the simple answer for that is for teachers to include journal writing time within the timetable to allow students to have adequate writing time.  Another way to assist our students with writing is to...

  With a continuation of the topic trends in writing this week we covered the modern trends as well as some of the essentials of teaching writing. It touched upon how children need time to write and it could be done in the form of journal time where students will perform free writing. It was also said that children need regular responses to their writing as well as the need to publish their work. But the most important fact was that the writer’s workshop covers or goes well with all the major principles. Numerous writing strategies were demonstrated by teacher-student and lecturer alike. The strategies that stood out to me that I would readily implement in my classroom are free writing, sentence combining, teacher modeling, and creativity/imagery instruction.   Free writing could be implemented either in the morning or the afternoon. This would be beneficial for the students because with practice comes perfection. Sentence combining would be helpful because it enables pupils...

          Happy to have finally gotten on board with this social writers’ platform despite many challenges. As we embarked upon this journey: Trends in Writing Workshop as a community of learners sharing and collaborating our experiences and ideas with the focus on developing our students writing skills to become better writers and meeting the needs of every individual students. Trends in Writing Workshop has taught me a scaffolding writing technique where a mini-lesson is being taught for 5-10 minutes, focusing on a particular task on hand catering for all students for example recapping the five elements of the writing process namely prewriting: where students would brainstorm and discuss ideas,  drafting: of the idea discussed could be the first draft, revising adding more information and experiences then editing: where we search for grammatical errors and pronunciation, correcting of verb tense finally publishing: advertising the finished product on...

 Entry Three:  Expository Writing: The 8- Step Writing Process "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann Does writing feel like a chore? Then here are a few steps that will get you through with ease. Step 1: Idea An idea is needed. Have it clearly in your mind before moving forward. Get a topic or subject you want to write on. Use graphic organizers to highlight the topic and outline the supporting details. There are 5 types: sequence, problem/solution, description, cause/effects, and compare/contrast. My topic for the expository piece is Healthy and Unhealthy Foods Step 2: Think Think carefully about your audience (the readers). Ask the question, who am I writing for? What grade or age are you targeting or looking at? My intended audience will be children, ages 9- and 10-year-olds in Grade 4. What are their characteristics and need? Need to make the right choices when purchasing snacks and food from school v...

 Entry Two: Scaffolding Techniques in Writing  "Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's" - Stephen King       In order to produce great writers, as teachers we need to first create a writing environment. To do  this, we need to first be educated on scaffolding techniques that we can use as innovative ways to teach  writing. These ways can be original from the drawing board or traditional with a modern spin/twist as  we are now teaching in 21st century classrooms with technologically advanced students. I personally  believe that these techniques be effective in teaching writing and enhancing the writing environment  for all my students, all ages, abilities, cognitive levels, and learning styles. The following are eight (8)  scaffolding techniques that I found rather interesting as a few are new to my mental schema and so I  have broadened my knowledge base as a teacher in preparatio...

  This week was about trends in writing. The 8-step writing process was the first process that was introduced into the lesson to help students with their writing. The process included step 1 idea. This is where you brainstorm your ideas on various topics that you would like to write about. So instead of choosing something for students to write about you let them throw out ideas as a class and vote on which topic catches their interest. Step 2 includes thinking. In this step, you will ponder the needs, wants, and characteristics of the topic. For example, on the topic of water conservation, one may think why is it important to save water and the answer may be that even though water is a renewable resource, we still have to preserve it because it is limited in Antigua at times. Step 3 includes the idea and reader. This is basically narrowing down the main idea that would be focused on the main topic. An example of this would be the main idea or broad topic of water conservation and...

 Once again, I have learned additional steps in writing that will be beneficial to my students. But with is exercise, I must first model the type of writing that I want my students to produce to assist them in the best way possible. I must first have a positive attitude towards writing so that my children may become interested in writing so that it is not reflected as a chore for them. This clearly illustrates the gradual release of responsibility strategy which emphasizes the need for teachers to model and provide guided practice for their students before allowing them to work independently. I can also help students to make generalizations based on how the piece of writing is structured. They can look at the teacher's piece of writing and extract important details like how to appropriately use punctuation marks throughout their paragraph, acknowledge how to begin each paragraph, and even appreciate the use of different vocabulary words, just to name a few.  One interesting fa...

 Entry One: Writer's Workshop  "If a story is in you, it has to come out" -William Faulkner.       Initially, when I thought of literature being a course, my mind went back to when I was a college student and had to read several assigned books that were to be completed at the end of the semester followed by a book reports and exam. I somewhat thought it would be a similar course for Teacher Training Department when I saw Literature: Reading and Writing. However, it was nothing compared to college literature but a course to guide us as teachers in the primary education sector in effectively teaching and developing writing in our students at the primary level. That is, Literature 102: focusing on the writing aspect where we were introduce to Writer's Workshop. Writer's Workshop is a student-centered framework designed as a guide for teaching writing using nine (9) steps or stages which includes a three-part conference. Furthermore, this wo...

 Recently, it was so amusing how I was able to be introduced to additional ways to scaffold students writing. This is geared at ensuring that there are multiple opportunities for students to not only engage in writing but also to help them to develop good writing habits. As an educator, it is always good to ensure that you can cater to the needs of all your learners, and what better way to do that than to use many different strategies to ensure that this happens. Now I can proudly speak about the additional ten scaffolding strategies that are now added to my list. First and foremost, one interesting way for teachers to engage their students in writing is to use oral writing. Some students may struggle with writing but once they can speak about what they are going to write it helps a lot. To further test this theory, I tried using this strategy with my daughter. She had been recently given the topic of "How to prepare for a storm" and orally stating what she wants to write hel...

       Firstly, it is important for me as a teacher to understand the purpose of the LIT 102 course and from my understanding so far, the ideology behind this course is to engage my students in becoming writers. However, before I can engage my students to become proficient writers, I must first consider what is required of me as a teacher to assist my students in becoming successful writers. This is where the demonstration of misconceptions that teachers often have about how to teach writing is considered, as I reflect on the errors teachers often make, I can now consider possible ways of correcting those errors.              One may ask, how can a teacher teach writing? Scaffolding writing, a document I was recently exposed to has the scoop on that. It gave a detailed outline of 9 possible steps that teachers can utilize with their students when hosting a writer's workshop. A writer's workshop? This is just a fancy way of sayi...

  As we w rap up week two on scaffolding techniques in the writer’s workshop, I can briefly say that the majority of these techniques are new to me but exciting in the aspe ct that they can assist in generat ing more ideas to help students love to write. Some of these techniques include Focus lesson s , Pair writing , Peer editing group, writer's intent, Writer's need, Writers need, Writer's plan, Tracking writing status, and Group share. From what I understood about the techniques I gave them a definition in my own words .   Focus lesson: a 5-to-10-minute presentation that focuses on procedures and expectations. It can appear during pre-writing. An example includes a teacher providing a lesson on how to edit a piece of writing in class.  You can sometimes use it to teach content.   Pair writing is a technique for co-creating content that is founded on evidence-based research in real-time.  it appears during the drafting stage. An example is putting two...