Writing Essentials - Chapter 2

I was excited to read that Regie Routman believes that the celebration of our students' writing needs to move right up front to become a major teaching tool. I agree with her that enjoyment and writing have not coexisted. I don't know how many times I have told my students, "Guys, don't worry about everything being correct when you write today." "Today, we want to celebrate ideas."
I know at the beginning of the year when I ask if anyone wants to share their piece of writing I have few volunteers. But, as the year progresses, more and more of them want to share. I can see that they are beginning to see themselves as writers and the affirmation from me and their peers takes away the fear of writing and gives them the freedom to take risks. It's true, the celebration process does seem to make them grow taller right before your eyes.
Regie talks about starting with a story on page 23 and I tend to agree family stories, traditions, and everyday happenings are great hooks for students. Freedom of topic is important! One thing I need to work on is writing more in front of my students. They see me use graphic organizers, lists, webs, and etc., but I think they need to actually hear and see my thinking/writing process.
Her closing sentence in this chapter, "Teaching, supporting, and expecting kids to do their best is where the fun begins." was powerful to me because of the word fun. More and more as educators we feel the test pressure, getting it right, or teaching to the test. Sometimes we wonder where is the fun, the joy? Personally, the joy and fun returns for me when I listen to a student's free choice journal entry, a story, a written response to a question in Guided Reading, a thank you note, or a letter.

Writing Essentials - Chapter 1

I concurred with many of the shared beliefs on writing found on page 9. Especially there are lots of ways to prewrite, direct teaching of skills is part of writers workshop, peer conferencing needs to be modeled and done well to be useful, students need time to think before they write, and last but not least, not all writing needs to be graded. I totally agree that teaching writing by focusing on the parts and spending weeks teaching sentence fluency or word choice, is not how writers work. I had never thought of writing in this way, but it makes sense to look at a whole piece of writing then look at the parts and connect them back to the whole. I think I have been doing that, I just didn't see it that way in my head. I connected with this sentence found of page 15. "Whole-to-part-to-whole is much easier for teachers and students than part-to-whole-to-part."