More on Adolescent Lit

I like how Tom phrased it when he said, “We must come to believe that our writing is worth reading by others.” Students must believe this in order to do their best on writing assignments. I am so excited about the opportunity to give my students an authentic audience to show them that what they have to say matters outside of the classroom.

I’m in the process of figuring out how I am going to ask my students to organize their notebooks for next year and it was nice to have Linda point out the importance of having a place to put ideas. Now I plan on having a journal section in their notebook where they can reflect on how they are progressing through the material in class.

Last year I had several students who enjoyed drawing (and were very good at it). I plan to give students the option of making a story board as one of their drafts whenever we write in class.

Content Area Writing

This textbook makes a great case for writing in content areas, and has me very excited about bringing writing into my science class. Some of the strategies I plan to try are
Write to Learn
Writing breaks (I got to experience this at the ASCD conference…it did help)
Drawings/Sketches with stories/explanations to describe material
I also like how Toondoo helped with this
Clustering (to help students connect ideas)
Learning Logs
Dialogue journals (SILENT conversations!)
Maybe even with a classroom mailbox…
Double-Entry Journals (I like how these help organize thoughts with passages and the possibilities for differentiation)
Reflective writing (via blogs)
KWL (with posters – so we remember what we thought at the beginning)

Comics in the Classroom

Here is the comic that Ryan and I created and presented during class today.