The Sea of Literacy

Monday, October 29, 2007

Noticing....

As you get deeper into your integration experimentations, what are you noticing? Are you seeing things in a new way? Are you finding that the topic is around you in a way that it never was before? Are you having more conversations about it? Are you thinking about it more? Are you reading about it more? Have you taken any notes or written anything down to keep track of your process? What do you notice about yourself as a learner? Are you putting it off until the last minute, or are you truly giving yourself the luxury of thinking about it for awhile and letting it simmer? Has this "thing" that you have randomly chosen become a part of your everyday life and thinking? Have you forgotten what it was you had chosen? Has your focus changed? In what way?
You do not have to answer all of these questions, but I am hoping that one of them will allow you a "way in" to thinking about what you are noticing....so you can tell us all what you are noticing!!

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Beginning Thoughts.....

Hello Everyone,
Thank you for taking the time to experiment with this blog. Each week I will post something for you to respond to. This will allow us to keep our conversations going on line and make another place for us to share ideas, thoughts and interests. This week I want you to think about our Integration Experimentation. Is there something in your life you have always wanted to know more about, but have not made the time to do so? Here is your chance. Through this process we will look at the connections we make in the world of literacy as we become more aware of what it is we are interested in and how those connections allow us to have meaningful learning experiences.
Why The Sea of Literacy? Well, in thinking about it I was struck by the fact that all of the water sources eventually end up in the larger sea. We have looked at some of the smaller bodies of water in detail. We have looked specifically at reading and writing. This year we are looking more globally at the big picture, or what I think of as the sea of literacy. As you know things come and go in terms of instructional practices, best practices, reaseach-based as quickly as the tides change. What though, remains constant for you in your teaching? What are the parts of the Sea that always ring true for you? What is literacy and how do we become literate?

More Quotes from Wondrous Words

Page 214- “…a child who write every day can’t help but develop some sense of himself as a writer. If he is allowed to talk to others about his writing or their writing, he will develop more of his sense of self and also develop as a member of a responsive, literate community. If that student gets to read aloud something he has written, he comes to understand something of audience.”
Page 242 "One thing that I often do in ways-with-words lessons which I don't usually do in structure lessons is that I use actual texts to show how a crafting technique would look if we tried it."
Pg. 208 " 'He's messing with what I thought I knew.' Really good learning does that for us-it messes with what we think we know, creating a tension in our lives that can be uncomfortable. When we begin to feel this discomfort our only choice seems to be to quit learning and wait for the "pain" to go away, or to rethink what we know and muck around a bit in stuff that's really hard for us. I'm partial to mucking around a bit myself, and I have in fact made peace with the idea that there will always be some new hard thing for me to think about in my teaching. There will always be some part of my teaching that, when I think about it, causes me discomfort because I don't feel as sure about it."
Page 248 “Writing conferences are the backbone of the writing workshop. Good conferences move the teaching of writing from the whole-class carpet gathering to the individual writer’s desk. And what a big move it is. Conferencing is probably the hardest part of the workshop teaching. We have all spent years learning to do it better and in more and more theoretical ways, and adding this new knowledge base about the craft of writing into teaching; has only made it more challenging.”
"students are doing as writers, what they know about what they are doing, and what they need to know to do it even better" (p. 250)
p.243 "You'll want your students to have drafts and dreams of drafts floating around in their consciousness all the time, and their ability to envision craft in texts is what will make writing these drafts more and more automatic for them as they write throughout their lives."
Page 229, "Teach your students to learn to write from writers."
Pg. 235 “Formula writing has gotten a new head of steam because of testing, as many students are forced to write again and again in an artificial formula designed to help them do well on the “The Test.”
..."I thought immediately of a good writing technique I could teach him because I had that technique in my repertoire." (p. 248)

Some Favorite Quotes from Wondrous Words

Pg. 95. "Experienced writers begin moving toward writing projects not because they have great ideas, but because they have good reasons to write. With good reasons to write behind them, experienced writers know that any idea can become a good idea. It is the good reason to write that will propel the experienced writer forward through all the processes necessary to move an idea to publication."
(p.80) that, "I'm not reading to them because it's good for them; I'm reading to them because it's good for me."
page 103 and continues onto 104. She writes "When our students envision writers at work, then need to be able to see them doing lots more than just sitting at desks. Active development possibilities like those in the lists above need to be a big part of what our students can envision themselves doing as writers."
page 126 "It is important to me that students are able to envision using various crafting techniques in their own writing. If they can envision them, then they can have more power as writers because they have more choices about how they will write something."
page 106 "One of the simplest guiding questions for hypothetical inquiry is, I wonder where the author got the idea for this piece of writing?"

Integration Experimentations