Sentence Fluency in the Writer's Workshop

Writer's workshop requires time, yes, and dedication, but what a teacher needs are practical books and lessons to help them implement the writer's workshop. That is exactly what Spandel provides in this chapter when talking about how to teach sentence fluency within the writer's workshop structure.

The term 'Sentence Fluency' probably makes the average teacher cringe slightly because universities and colleges have never taught us anything beyond the five basic areas of reading, and, spoiler alert, sentence fluency is not one of these areas. Before reading this Spandel's suggestions, sentence fluency was a mysterious topic to address directly in the classroom, especially in the writer's workshop.

After reading Spandel, clear point emerge about this sentence writing fluency. Four things must happen to develop sentence fluency; the students must have great models that they copy and learn from, students must learn how punctuation can be used to create the rhythm of a sentence, students must read sentences aloud to hear the pauses and flows, and teachers must give feedback in order to help students improve.

But Spandel goes one step further by providing books, authors, and ways to use these for pages and pages; this is heaven to me, because one of the hardest parts can be scouring through book shelves at the book store to find the perfect teaching tool, sometimes with no luck at all. A resource like this that also includes what grade levels and what the author uses in the book may literally save my life when I am trying to implement the writer's workshop and teaching sentence fluency.

This chapter made me realize how crucial teaching mechanics, syntax, and other skills to writers during mini lessons that take place during the writer's workshop in order to develop more conscientious writers in my classroom.

The only caution teachers need to use in approaching this? Knowing developmentally what kind of sentence fluency students are ready to tackle in the classroom and what sentence types match the genre an the goal the students are striving for.

Implementing A Writer's Workshop

Make sure you have a plan!

While writing can be seen as an organic process, students function best, especially when asked to be creative, when they know they will have thirty minutes every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday to do so! Students like knowing what is coming, planning for it, preparing for it; some students will even think about how writing is tomorrow and bring in something to help their writing or come in with an idea all ready. 

Make sure you have a... Predictable Plan!

I love this question from Calkins about starting a writer's workshop: How will we initiate, scaffold, and guide the classroom to deeper engagement?

This is all in the planning process! The organization is vital to help students flourish! Will they have a writing journal, folder, or will they start with a graphic organizer? Will there be small groups, individual, or whole group time in each lesson? When will students write? When will they share with others? What kind of writing are they doing? Do the students already understand this type of writing, or will they need guidance in creating their pieces? Will there be conferences? How will they ask for or get a conference with a peer or with each other? What sign will they do to show you that they are stuck? If they are stuck, what will they need to move on? Asking these questions in the planning process will save you so much sweat, blood, and tears later when students may struggle or turn in a piece that is not their best work.

Writing research folders and index cards, two things that I wish I would have used when writing in school.  Storing all of the writing and research for a research project in one folder or binder would really help students who lose papers or get things out of order; creating this organization system for them helps control the chaos in the classroom, and stop the frenzy of students coming in frazzled because they have lost all of their work.

Use Post-It Notes as you walk around the room; maybe put those Post-It Notes on a clipboard to save for a conference, or put it on their work at some point so they can read the feedback that you have for them. In this way, you don't disturb their current thoughts and you don't mark on their work.

Focus conferences using specific questions, by conferencing when they have a question or a concern, or by making sure you open the conference with a specific question that focuses on a minilesson that has been done with the class. For example, if the students just learned about punctuation, or transition words, or about the first sentence of a paragraph, the conference can start with a question that asks, "How do you think you are using (insert item) in this piece of work?" Not only will this avoid empty or meaningless questions or conversations, but it will help both teacher and student use their time constructively in the conference.

Reading conference questions and writing conference questions have a few things in common; one is that you must ask enriching questions that help students get more out of what they are doing than what they would have on their own.

"Status of the Class" reports and share time are great ideas! During the writing process, students can share with each other, with you, or with the whole class a quick, thirty second synopsis of where they are and what they will do next; or in a sharing circle, they can read a piece that they have been working on in class. This also forces a student to look over what they have and engage in meta thinking about what they are working on. One question that I asked: How can we extend sharing circles to other subjects?

Digital Writing Workshops
What do we want digital tools to do? Is it enough to just do something old with the new digital tools?
For example, one class did PSA with a movie maker program. This involved writing the announcement, but the tool was used for more than typing up the report or doing the research.
My favorite quote from Hicks? "Digital writing is malleable."

What are questions or consequences that we have about using technology?

Calkins also suggests that we ask students these questions to help students seek self-approval and self-driven work instead of merely seeking teacher approval:
What are you going ot do next?
How do you like your draft?
What are you planning to do with this piece when you are done?

The whole point of the workshop is to:
"Teach the writer, then the writing." ~ Hicks

While writing is a personal act, and held personal by the writer, it is mediated with and interacts with and reflects the world around the reader, and that is what gives the writing of a student so much weight.

References:
Calkins, Lucy M. (1994). The Art of Teaching Writing. New Hampshire:Heinemann.
Daniels, H., Zemelman, S., Steineke, N. (2007). Content-Area Writing: Every Teacher's Guide. New Hampshire: Heinemann.
Hicks, Troy. (2009). Digital Writing Workshop. New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Where I'm From

I am from ballet slippers,

            From Nike and Gatorade.

I am from the near city activity bubble;

            Night stars, people with plenty to do,

            Where it tasted sweet to not know boredom.

I am from the oak and the pine trees,

            From the caterpillars,

Crawling up my arms onto the branches that held the birds

As they sang their sweet morning hellos;

I am from the Christmas advents and loud laughter

            From Gaga and Grandad’s backyard,

            And Chris’s basketball games.

I’m from the dancers and singers and painters and readers and drawers and writers and creators and bakers;

            And the jokesters.

From “Never give up” and

            “Practice, practice, try your best.”

I’m from the contemporary Baptist pew,

            Who drink and eat and believe that we have free will to glorify God.

I’m from Richmond, Virginia; Verona, Big Island, Bedford, Yorktown, & Charlottesville,

            From oysters and mashed potatoes.

From the time that my brother put crackers in his diaper to save his snack for later,

            The time my sister put herself in time out by hiding under the table.

Pictures and quotes spill out of scrapbooks;

            They memorialize friends, family, events, celebrations, gatherings, milestones;

I am from the moderate South,

From the women who have created opportunity,

From the education that can elevate and inspire,

From the movers and shakers and dreamers,

From the hard workers who create their own in this world.

The Writer's Workshop

The screeches of the train passing a few blocks away soothes me, bringing my mind back to my trips to New York City and Boston, to the rides on the Metro and the T, to the amazing friends with which I shared those journeys. I ache for even a glimpse of the snow that they have been getting recently!

I sit outside with me readings today because the birds are singing and the wind is blowing softly. They sing as though there is not almost a full month left of winter, as if it is not as cold as it may seem. My body can almost feel the swinging seat in my backyard, and the sight of the pine trees and the herb garden. But it is too soon for Spring.

My mind has been on the future recently, and chapter 2 in the Daniels et al. has allowed me to envision how I can set up and support students throughout the writing process in my future classroom. The Write-Alouds and collaborative group work resonate with me deepest beliefs about how students learn to write, how they can learn from feedback and from each other.

Let me explain why.

I see writing as a process students begin when they learn how to write words. Writing words evolves into writing phrases which develops into writing a complete sentence which leads to students putting a sentence together with another sentence, gradually forming a paragraph, which will grow into writing a paper.

Though this may sound fluid, students can hit so many snags along this road, and I believe that students can learn from parents, teachers, tutors, and peers about how to organize and refine writing; I also believe that the more students talk about writing, especially their own writing with each other, the more productive writing activities can prove for these students.

Like Daniels, Zemelman, & Steineke book Content-Area Writing (2007) I believe you can't just assign a paper, then take red ink to all the mistakes in hind sight. Clear expectations and supports must be implemented at the beginning and throughout the writing process.

Students must be engaged, feel safe to share writing, and feel motivated to write about a topic they care about, and the passion to feel as though they have a voice worth sharing.

One way to get students engaged, the Four Corners Activity, is my favorite idea from this chapter. This creates an environment where different opinions are celebrated and discussed in a respectful manner, and students can find a platform from which to positively and respectfully find their own voice.

As students gather information they are learning content; and if students are checking in with each other, they are not just learning content themselves.

Organization proves the most challenging step for students who struggle. Pre-writing graphs, outlines, brainstorming sheets, T charts, there are so many suggestions for how to get students organized before writing a paper. But many times I have seen students not fully comprehend how to transfer these to a paper, nor how to use these tools as a reference when they get stuck in the writing process.

So how do we help students with this step? That is my greatest concern moving forward. The Four Card Stud if a great start, because students are getting their ideas down and selecting what they want to talk more about on each card; but what happens when a student gets stuck? One thing that I have seen is the option for a student to consult with a peer or teacher to talk about what they are thinking, where they are going, and how they want to get there in their writing.

And one of the most important steps: Letting It Rest. This is so pertinent for students; they need a break, then a time to come back to their writing with fresh eyes and new ideas. Steps like this also help students to feel liberated instead of bogged down or burdened by a writing task.

The assessment portion left me disappointed; I think that setting a student goal should be more long term than one paper, and I think they should have talked about getting feedback and a second chance to fix mistakes before the teacher records a grade. That way if a student has an error, the teacher knows that more intensive support is needed, and if the teacher finds something wrong afterwards, the student already had a chance to fix problems. Rubrics are useful, but students need to know the criteria that will be used to judge their work.

These readings have really allowed me to think more deeply about how I can set up and implement a writing workshop for students. How would you set up a writer's workshop? What subject would you choose? What would you ask of your students? Who would students write for? How would you make it a genuine and authentic writing activity?

Six Traits and ShrinkLit

The Six Traits
This week a video and the reading focused on these Six Traits:

1. Ideas
2. Organization
3. Voice
4. Word Choice
5. Conventions (i.e. Spelling and Punctuation)
6. Sentence Fluency

These Six Traits are supposed to help students to develop and improve their writing.

The students in my classroom could use the first strategy during the pre-writing stage, then use the organization strategy in order to help them transfer that pre-writing into a first draft. After the first draft, students can use the trait of voice, word choice, conventions, and sentence fluency when they are revising and editing their own writing, then again when they peer edit writing. 

These six traits don’t only help my students, but they can help me develop my writing. I can model how I use these six traits to form and create my writing, as well as how I use it to make my writing better.

I wonder how much background knowledge students need to bring to the table in order to use these in their writing. For some students, they would need each of these traits introduced and focused on for a week, making the writing process six weeks long. Would I change the writing prompts in order to elude any boredom from my students, or would I keep the overall theme the same in order to make these traits easier for students to apply? Obviously this would depend upon the exit slips and the individual learning needs and pace for my students, but I can’t help but formulate in my head all of the different ways I may have to structure the six traits in order to make them most useful for my students.

Here is an example of analyzing a poem, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott using the Six Traits:

Thirty Years ago, my older brother, who was

ten years old at the time, was trying to get a

report on birds written that he'd had three

months to write, which was due the next day.

We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and

he was at the kitchen table close to tears,

surrounded by binder paper and pencils and

unopened books on birds, immobilized by the

task ahead. Then my father sat down beside

him, put his arm around my brother's

shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy, just

take it bird by bird."

1. Idea: 

My father encouraged my brother to get started on a daunting task by taking it one step at a time.

2. Organization:

The setting was given first; the stage was set, before the action took place.

3. Voice:

This poem develops a strong voice; you read this poem as if she is telling you the story in person.

4. Word Choice:

She used the antiquated term binder paper in order to keep in tune with the fact that this event happened thirty years ago. She also used alliteration in her father's advice in order to make the advice speak even louder.

5. Conventions:

The punctuation causes flows and ebbs in order to capture the attention of the reader and in order to emphasize the emotions that her brother was feeling and how calming the advice of the father was to the son. Before the father stepped in there was little punctuation in order to make the reader feel how fast and anxious her brother was when they were on vacation; then when the father comes into the picture there are commas, which cause the reader to pause and feel the peace the father brought to the situation.

6. Sentence Fluency:

The sentences are purposefully left hanging at the end of lines in order to make the first word of the new line to be most powerful.

ShrinkLit

A strategy that was highlighted in the reading talked about the ShrinkLit strategy; besides the annoying lack of a space and the too obvious connection to the strategy, the students in my classroom could benefit from using this strategy. When a student uses this strategy, they are summarizing what they have read by writing a poem; this strategy is a bit more complicated and requires more advanced skills for students to use. In addition, this is a summarization strategy that utilizes poetry in order to make it stand apart from the other research and evidence-based practices already in use, such as RAP, SQ3R, or GIST.

There are five steps to this strategy:

1. Ask students to choose a few chapters in a novel or a short piece of literature.

2. Tell them to write a poem that focuses on the main ideas.

3. The poem should be ten lines long.

4. They should use figurative language.

5. Students share with a small group of peers or with the whole class.

Notice that this should be used mostly with non-fiction pieces of literature, with older students who have already studied figurative language, and with students who have built a community of trust so that students already feel as though they can share their work with the other members of the group or the whole class. While this may be a more creative way to have students synthesize information, there are too many constraints for some students and too little direction for others. I can imagine a student with a disability struggling or thriving to complete this type of assignment.

 

One example of using the strategy:

This is a ShrinkLit poem about the Six Traits.

 

Ideas create itineraries for writing; record them before they run away.

Organization makes or breaks the creation;

What goes where, and what will make my audience care?

Voice gives the story character; my voice lets them know I'm the narrator.

Word Choice can make the difference between boring and exploring;

Conventions, conventions, why do we need conventions?

Spelling and punctuation can get a work some mentions.

Sentence Fluency; where is the flow? Where will this sentence go?

Go through the steps once again, 1-6, thank goodness there's not ten!

When using these together, I'm guaranteed to become a better writer!

Sources:

http://www.adlit.org/article/39928/

Spandel, Vicki. (2013) Creating Writers: Through 6 Traits, Process, Workshop, and Literature. New York: Pearson.