Integrating reading and writing leads to more authentic teaching, better reading and writing, and higher scores on tests. Children’s writing reflects the quality of reading they do. The texts that children read influence the quality of their writing. Children who read well-written literature (folktales, narratives, and trade books) become better writers than children who primarily read basal reading texts. Being an avid reader is the best preparation for becoming a writer. I like when Gary Paulsen wrote about how the most important part of writing is to read. If you read enough, when you sit down to write, that information is in your head and you can write, or it will start to work for you. This is evident in my first grade classroom. Those students that spend a great deal of time reading at home and school, writing becomes natural for them.
Another part of this chapter that was helpful for me was using writing in guided reading groups. The most important part of guided reading groups is to make sure that students comprehend what they have read. Asking a guided reading group to do a little bit of writing is a great way to monitor and improve comprehension. This holds students accountable and lets the teacher know how students are doing. Asking worthwhile questions goes along with guided reading groups and whole group instruction. Students that answer higher-level questions get higher scores on standardized tests.
Erica,
ReplyDeleteI love how you talk about incorporating writing in guided reading groups. You are so right that writing can be a powerful way to create that reading-writing connection that sometime is missing when we have to teach in segmented chunks of time. I love that you want to have students write to respond to literature and create higher-level questions for student responses in order to stretch their minds and have them grow as readers and as writers.
Yes, reading and hearing quality literature exposes students to extensive vocabulary, well-crafted sentences and paragraphs, genre features such as humor or suspense. It also provides motivation to seek out more books by the same author and think about what it is about a particular author's style that they like.
ReplyDeleteWhat teacher does not want higher test scores? In chapter 6 we learned different strategies to do that. Guided reading used to be my favorite time of the school day, but now that I have read and integrated Daily Five it has totally reconfigured how my guided reading time looks like. Daily 5 is becoming more popular and I encourage every teacher who teaches Reading/Language art to read it. The sisters have struck gold with their innovative strategies during literacy blocks. Have you heard of Daily Five?
ReplyDeleteComments by: Jacinda
ReplyDeleteIntegration is the most important point of this chapter. I don’t have a problem incorporating writing into reading. My problem is finding the time to carry it across the curriculum. The scores from tests prove that the more a student reads, the better they score. My only question is what about every other subject? We as teachers have other areas besides reading and writing to work on.