My district dove into Common Core ELA last year with the introduction to Balanced Literacy and reading workshop.
Midway through the year, we introduced writing workshop through the fabulous training of Matt Glover. Below you will find an image of Matt Glover and a couple books that he has written.
I have enjoyed my training and conversations with him and look forward to our district training that he is presenting this Friday.
Click on the image of Matt Glover to find more information about him and his books.
What an experience that was!
And how lucky am I to be part of it!
Click on the images below to read more about Lucy Calkins and Natalie Louis (my presenter from TCWRP).
My training was geared more towards primary and my administrators was towards upper elementary.
A big topic during this time was the writing process.
In my training, Natalie referred to the writing process as Think, Plan, Write, Revise, Edit, Publish.
My principals heard it as Collecting, Developing, Drafting, Revising, Editing, Publishing/Celebrating.
In the world of Matt Glover, he talks of three stages during a unit: Immersion, Close Study, Writing Under the Influence.
On the internet, you most often hear of the process referred to as Prewriting, Drafting, Revising, Editing, Publishing.
Are these all the same process just a spin off of each other? I mean you can't make money using the same thing as someone else. You have to make it your own and name and describe it differently right?
As a Teaching and Learning Coach (known as an Instructional Coach to most people) my job is to guide and instruct my teachers.
That's difficult when you are hearing so many different stories!
What is the "right" process?
With this in mind, I am almost finished with writing a unit on Vignette-style Memoirs.
I love learning knew things, but with fresh information in my brain, it makes revising this unit more difficult.
It makes me question what I have.
Every 5th grade teacher in my district will be using these.
I want them to be the best they can be.
So where do language standards fit into the writing process?
Do they fit at all? Part of me thinks they should be incorporated into word study time.
At this point in the game, I have them in the revising and editing section.
We are incorporating CCSS L.5.1 and L.5.3 (varied sentence structure and verb tense in particular).
Are these revision lessons or editing lessons?
At first I had sentence structure as revision because you vary them to add to them meaning of your story. For instance, short sentences can slow down a story and long run-on type sentences create a sense of urgency or excitement.
But now I am thinking now, that it should be editing because it is about structure (simple, compound, and complex sentences).
After spending some time researching on the internet, I found that no one seems to have a good answer to this.
Revising and editing have a blurred line between them.
I have verb tense as an editing lesson. For the most part I feel good about this decision because it would fall under usage.
But at this point, I am questioning everything!
So what do you think?
What is the writing process to you?
Where does sentence structure fit in the process?
What about verb tense?
Thanks for you thoughts about this!
Antoinette
