Chapters 7 and 8

     In Writer's Workshop, teachers have to keep themselves from becoming too focused on gathering so many samples. The purpose of collecting the samples from the students is so that they can become comfortable and great at the ultimate goal of the workshop- publishing. Teachers need to ensure they are frequently having the students go through each step of the writing process. Each time they draft, revise, and edit they get even better at noticing what needs to change to make their writing the best it can be.
     This is where publishing comes in.You must give students a goal to move towards or else they feel the writing process was done for no reason. If they know that other people will be viewing their work they will want to raise the bar for themselves and complete better pieces. To keep the students excited about publishing all through the school year the teacher should give them a variety of publishing opportunities. The students can become bored with it if they are publishing to the same people in the same way over and over. It is up to the teacher to keep the projects creative and interesting! They should always be looking for new ways to inspire their students to lift the quality of their writings.

Chapter 5 & 6

Chapter fives gives really great ideas and strategies for helping our students to become writers through Writing Workshop. The use of “flip pads” was one tool that I thought would be useful. The writer explains that a flip pad is a small notebook that the students carry around with them both during school and at home. Whenever a fresh, new idea for story or writing topic comes to mind, they can immediately jot it down. The students are apt to come up with extra ideas through this method because they will not waste time searching for paper and pencil. They begin to live more like a writer as they pay closer attention to the environment around them. I also feel that the memory banks strategy can be very effective in stimulating writing ideas. By sharing memories with the class, the children will begin to think of their own experiences and, hopefully, pull writing topics from their personal “memory bank”. After practice, it becomes easier for the student to reflect back into their memories and write stories based off what they recall. As teachers we need to motivate our students to know and understand what it means to tell your own personal story, and that everyone’s story is worth telling.

                During the student conferences, it is our job to praise the student and make him feel good about himself, while at the same time, pointing our areas of improvement.  We should always push and motivate the children to achieve higher goals. One of the challenges for many people when first beginning this method, is learning to look at the student work and thinking about not just that one student but all the students. Usually there will be more than one student struggling with the same area of the writing process. You can use one student’s work to help others improve as well. You use your students as a teachable moment. I really appreciated the examples in this chapter. I have never seen a conference wrote out in that way and it really helped to visualize the best approaches to helping the student succeed. Also, at the end of the chapter the troubleshooting techniques were extremely helpful and encouraging.

Picture Book Study

The picture book study is very interesting.You can do many different lessons in a classroom, all based on a picture book. I liked the sheet students filled out after reading a picture book. The "Getting Inspired By A Good Picture Book" page helps the students to keep their ideas that stemmed from  that book in one place. The students begin to understand the qualities of a good picture and then through this process they begin to understand the work that goes into creating a good book. The picture book study chart was something I thought was really interesting. I like that the columns are divided out into sections and that it is class created. This helps the students establish ownership, but it also lets new ideas and creative thinking flow together. One student can bring a detail to the study chart that maybe no one else noticed, this will get the other children to start thinking along those lines also. It also it just a quick reference guide for the kids to glance at when they have a question about a certain book. I loved the images at the end of the chapter that show the exact stages that went into creating the picture book. This is a good visual to show that is does take time, but in the end the reward matches the effort put in.

Writer's Workshop

Before taking this class I had never heard of the Writer's Workshop that is now being utilized in classrooms. Reading this book has made me excited about the possibility teaching this method in my own classroom. The teachers that came up with this method were very methodical and thought about each step in the the writing process with great care. By spending a small amount of time each week in the Writer's Workshop students will greatly improve on their writing, reading, and comprehension skills. Also, this type of setting helps the student to build confidence in themselves and their writing as they learn to take more risks. Our country wants every child that goes through our school system to be literate with our language. To truly do that though, the child should have a strong grasp on the language, and all that goes into producing a solid writing work. In my opinion, this Writer's Workshop seems to be well on the way to achieving that goal. 

I really enjoyed how Shelley Harwayne describes the notebook to the children. She says, "Imagine doing the kind of writing that you will want to save for a lifetime. When you are twenty, fifty, or eighty you will still keep these beautiful bound books in a special place because you will always want to recall what kind of kid you were, what you paid attention to, and what you thought about when you were young." When showed how important this writing could be to them later in life, the child takes more pride and ownership in their work and wants to achieve high goals. This gets them excited about writing! I thought it was very thorough that the writers included exact lists of the tools you as the teacher and your students will need to accomplish the workshop. I especially loved the quote, "this means allowing teachable moments to take over and slowing down when our students are not ready to move on." The writers on this book, fellow teachers, truly put their students above all else and genuinely WANT every one of them to succeed.

I loved these first four chapters of the No-Nonsense Guide to Teaching Writing. I think they lay out the Writer's Workshop in such a way that is interesting and (hopefully) gets the readers excited about implementing this workshop in their own class. I will be honest, I highlighted and underlined so many thoughts and ideas in these chapters that there is no way for me to comment on everything I loved!