Calkins+Ch.+8

//Lakeisha & Hannah//
//[|Link to Glog]//

7, 8, and 9 year olds are in the middle of changes, so within out classes there will be children with enormously wide rides of abilities and interests.

Essential question: does this trait of 2nd and 3rd graders reflect their developmental needs or our curriculum? For example, second graders are concerned about doing things the right way. Is that curriculum or natural in development?

The excitement and creativity of kindergarten and 1st grade is replaced by the world of doing things correctly—we have to remember that they are still so young. They still believe in the tooth fairy!

The Continental Divide separating “child-centered” from “curriculum-centered.” We need to bring some of kindergarten back into 2nd and 3rd grade.

In the earlier grades, teachers understand that children develop intellectually at different rates, and the goal is to teach all the students at their own pace. By 2nd grade, students are required to “catch up.”


 * "A classroom filled with building, singing, talking, observing, and planning is also good for literacy."

Writing Workshop: children with very different levels of proficiency can work side by side. Writing also becomes less lonely.
 * We must look for opportunities to nudge individual children to write for functional, real-world reasons.
 * We must encourage send-grade children to move toward writing texts that do not depend on drawings.
 * Don't abbreviate the writing workshop so it lasts only as long as children’s attention lasts. They need more time than they know what to do with.

Notebooks: Revision is much simpler when children keep notebooks. They must not only gather entries but also shape them into specific genres, which are then published.
 * Notebooks help them learn to write longer
 * Easy to reorder
 * Helps students deal constructively with their growing ability to anticipate an audience’s response to their writing.
 * Notebooks help encourage children to continue to notice simple things so they can have topics to write about.

Young writers often pay more attention to procedure in the writing workshop then to the purposes behind those procedures. The procedures often become ends in and of themselves.
 * This is fine as long as children internalize these procedures, because as they develop, they will be able to use it with more flexibility.

Revision: 2nd graders’ revisions tend to be either new versions of writing or corrections. Children tend not to understand that the purpose of revision is not to correct but to discover. They tend to approach each new draft as if it was a new piece of first-draft-only writing. If we anticipate that this may happen, we’ll be sure to show children how we write new entries that extend and deepen earlier entries.


 * Transition:** Teachers should encourage their students so they grow confidence and become less worried about doing everything "correctly." One goal of these grades is to help students prepare to understand that writing should be a public, even collaborative activity.