Teachers College Reading and Writing Project 2 ... - Heinemann

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project 2 Grade Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 nd

Overview In the teaching of writing, curriculum comes from both the ongoing structures that last across the year and from the changing units of study that provide learners with their course-of-travel. The ongoing structures provide a continuity of daily practice and of coaching which allows learners to practice and improve skills (this is necessary whether the learner is a gymnast, a programmer, a mathematician or a writer). These structures include minilessons, conferences, partnerships, writing folders, work time and the like. The units of study, on the other hand, allow students to tackle new and often increasingly difficult challenges. What’s necessary is education that involves both ongoing structures and changing units of study. The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project’s recommended calendar for second grade writing is designed with New York State’s rigorous assessments and the National Center for Education and Economy standards in mind. Teachers from other states sometimes need to alter the curriculum to take into account their state’s standards and assessments. We also recommend that teachers embark on authoring their own units. To support teachers in beginning this work, there are opportunities within this calendar for teachers to make personal choices and to craft their own unit. This calendar may not exactly match what any one of you might decide to teach across your year, but we are all excited about this as one highly recommended template. We are aware, however, that the best curricular calendar is one which a group of teachers (preferably those across a grade level) co-author together, taking into account their own areas of expertise and curiosity, their students’ abilities, prior experiences, and interests, their state and local assessments, and their school’s curricular plans. We therefore encourage you to adapt this to suit you and yours. We do not believe there is anything inevitable about this particular curriculum. We know there are lots of other ways in which teachers-of-writing could imagine a year-long writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study because this is the line of work that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project will support across the upcoming year with conference days. If you and your colleagues find the conference days help your teaching, you will probably adopt large portions of this as your plan for the year.

1 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


Like all our curricular calendars, this one stands on the shoulders of many years of work in hundreds of classrooms. Unlike the others, a version of this curriculum has been written in great detail in a series of books, Units of Study in Primary Writing (Heinemann, 2003, http://www.unitsofstudy.com). There is also a DVD containing 22 videos which illustrate this curriculum.

Second Grade Writing Calendar September October November December January February March April May June

Launching with Small Moments Writing for Readers Realistic Fiction Authors as Mentors Author your own unit: Songs, Scripts, Letters, Adaptations to Fairy Tales, Literary Nonfiction How To and All About Books Writing about Reading or Independent Writing Projects Poetry Writing in a Content Area Independent Writing Projects or Revision



September

Unit 1 - Launching the Writing Workshop: Focus on Small Moments In this unit, you will help children see themselves as authors, valuing tiny moments from their lives. You will help your students hold these moments in their minds and hearts, then make stories out of them, stories that stretch across a sequence of several pages. Children will write at least half a dozen stories, each one spanning approximately 4 to 6 pages. During this first unit of study, it will be important to ensure that each child can sustain work during the writing workshop by generating ideas for writing, planning for writing, and then drafting as best as he or she can. Since most of your students will have been in Writing Workshop for the past two years, they will be familiar with the structures and routines of a workshop. Still, you will need to remind them of how to move to and from the meeting area, how to organize their writing folders (with ongoing pieces on one side and finished pieces on the other), and how to keep themselves writing (choosing to add on to an ongoing piece of writing or to begin a new piece of writing when their first piece is done), and how to resist interrupting your conferences with other children. Your second grade writers will need choices of paper. Some will write on paper which includes a two or three inch wide box for drawing, with six or seven lines for writing. Other paper will include a much smaller space for a picture with more space for writing. Some teachers like the option of long thin pages formed by folding notebook paper in half, with children making their own 1 1/2” square box at the top corner of each page for a sketch. In order to establish a productive hum in your workshops, rally your students to produce a lot of writing and to write with stamina. Give them multi-page booklets from the start and encourage them to write more than they at first believed possible. Show examples of student work which creates a horizon for all your writers. You may need to review with your class the concept of choosing topics from their lives. Students can think about small adventures they’ve had on the bus, in their backyard, on their street, in their bedrooms, at a relative’s house, in the cafeteria—the works! They can think of small moment stories linked to any of their favorite things to do. They’ll be drawing on memories so they can turn to a partner and say, “I remember the time when I…,” listing times they’ve experienced. You will remind children how to generate many ideas for true stories. Avoid creating a situation in your classroom where children wait for you to give the prompt of the day. Instead, each child should have a repertoire of ways to access their own memories. Your instruction will also need to remind children to focus on one small moment, a “seed,” rather than a “watermelon” topic. Instead of ‘my visit to grandma’s,” a child might write: “The night grandma flicked soap on my nose while we washed the dishes.” In other words, teach your students not to write bed-to-bed (morning-to-night) stories, but to zoom in on a memorable moment. Demonstrate for students how you think of big, long events and then choose just one small thing that happened. For example, if your story is about a day spent at the beach, tell children that you could write about the whole day there; but, instead you will choose one thing that 3 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


happened, the most important thing that happened – like when you were playing in the waves – and write all about that. As you get your students to think about their own narratives, you will remind them that a writer makes a movie in the mind, recalling what happened first and then recording that. As a class, you can pick a shared experience, and then recall and retell that experience. It will help for children to sketch each step in the sequence into the picture-space on a page. The children can them point to the sketch on a page or story-tell the whole story of that one step in the sequence, before writing that page. Continue to emphasize the storytelling that can support your children’s oral and written language development. Children should be able to progress through the writing process without a loss of independence, telling their stories to a partner, touching each page in a booklet, saying that story in the air. Then they should be able to write their story, dividing it across the pages, working to make their pages match the movies they have in mind of the unfolding event. You might encourage children to first close their eyes and envision the event. Then they can write about it as if it’s happening again. You will want to especially encourage your ELLs to sketch pictures along with their writing. Many students come to us from other countries with literacy experiences in their native language. Students who are in the early stages of English language acquisition can participate in the writing workshop by writing in their native language. When these children do write in English, they benefit from practicing and rehearsing their writing out loud with a partner. They will also benefit from learning how to use connectives and transitional words that will help them move their story along, so when you are with the child in the midst of story-telling, prompt them with ‘and then…’ and ‘after that…’ transitions in a way which encourages them to repeat your additions and build upon them. If your children participated in a writing workshop during the previous year, it is likely they will remember that stories include dialogue, small actions, and thoughts. You can teach them that one way to elaborate on each page of their story is to add in the things characters say and think, and the small actions they do. Teach kids that writers add details to the important parts of their stories. One way to do this is to think about how a writer can use small actions to reveal a feeling – to show not tell. For example, a child writing about her fear of the high dive might write, “I stood at the edge of the board looking down. My knees started to shake. I held my elbows. ‘Oh no,’ I thought. I didn’t want to go in the water. My toes hugged the edge.” Place emphasis on planning small moments and helping your students draft, using these elements in their writing to show not tell. Another way to help students elaborate on their writing is to help them thread the setting throughout their pieces. Many students describe the setting at the start of their stories – ‘It was a cool, sunny day’ – but forget to carry this throughout their pieces. The student telling about her fear of jumping off the high dive might include setting later in her piece by writing, ‘As I got ready to dive, the sun hit my eyes. It made me cry, not from sadness but from sun.’ Teach students that by recalling and including details about setting, they help their readers better envision their story. 4 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


You’ll want to teach students to develop a repertoire of spelling strategies. Writers should make use of the word wall, using known words to write unknown words. Teach children who need this help to hear and record sounds and to write with punctuation. Early in the year it is important to place an emphasis on rereading. This will help students clarify what they have already said, determine what else needs to be added, and pay attention to sentence structure. As you near the end of this unit, teach children that writers reread their own writing often and easily revise as part of writing in an effort to tell the truth. Writers revise to add and show details they have overlooked, to clarify confusions they have created, or to convey feelings that matter in a story. Partnership Work in Writing Workshop At the start of the year, partner up the children and help the partners build a writing relationship. We know that real writing partners in the world help us with our work by pointing out our strengths, helping us decide what to say and how to say it, and pushing us to clarify our thoughts. Help students do these things with each other so that they form relationships around writing, find ways of talking about their writing, and have another writing teacher in the classroom who can help them find more to say. This will also help children develop the skills to confer with each other. Teach partners how to give each other compliments. For example a partner might say, “I like the part when you fell down. When you said, “Mom! Mom! Help me!” I felt really worried for you.” Or another partner might say, “I like how you used dialogue in the first part of your story because I really felt like I was there.” Teach partners how help each other rehearse their writing. Kids can practice telling each other their stories and they can help each other out their oral stories onto the page. You may decide to teach students how to use some of the accountable-talk prompts to nudge each other to elaborate. One child can say to another, “Can you say more about that? What do you mean?”



October

Unit 2 – Writing for Readers: Thinking about Spelling, Conventions and the Sound of our Writing Within Narrative Writing In this unit, children continue to write focused narratives, cycling through the process of writing they’ve just studied in order to draft and revise at least half a dozen true stories. Meanwhile, the spotlight of your teaching is on conventions. This unit begins with you confessing to children that you sometimes have a hard time reading their writing. Until this point in the year, you will have reveled in their approximations. Now, because you want to help children develop a stronger command of spelling and conventions, you will convey that in order for readers to appreciate their stories, writers need to include more sounds in their spellings, incorporate more sight words in their texts, and include punctuation and capitals. By adding conventions, children make it easier for others to read and appreciate their texts! By emphasizing that each child knows that he or she has power to help readers, you make word walls, periods, quotation marks, and capital letters the talk of the town! As you begin, tell kids that they will be writing small moment pieces all month long but from now on, they will be writing not just for themselves but also for other readers. You will definitely put new emphasis on partnership share times so your words ring true. Teach your children that since they will be writing for an audience, they need to consider how their writing looks (spelling), and sounds (punctuation and sentence structure). Assess your students’ writing from the past unit in order to determine which conventions and spelling strategies your children already tend to use well. This will allow you to identify areas of strength, and to build on areas that need support. Be sure to keep your teaching within your children’s zone of approximation. For example, if students are having a difficult time punctuating a simple sentence, don’t teach them how to combine sentences! If you see your students are gesturing towards apostrophes – putting apostrophes in the right words but in the wrong places – use this as a signal that now is the time to teach apostrophes. You will probably want to begin this unit by concentrating on spelling. Teach kids that as they write there are other ways to spell besides stretching out the word and hearing sounds. They can spell, using their knowledge of word families and known words to help them spell chunks of unknown words. Of course, writers also rely on sight words and in this unit, you’ll be sure writers do this. Encourage them to use the word wall words to relearn words they don’t yet know instantly. As the unit continues, you may want to shift your focus to punctuation. Encourage children to insert periods at the ends of their sentences as they write those sentences. That is, periods can’t be added as afterthoughts during editing! Teach children that as they write, they need to reread frequently. As they do this, they will want to insert any punctuation they have forgotten. Show kids how to choose parts of their writing that they want to work on more and then encourage them to make those sections more clear, specific and true. They’ll want to 6 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


reread a chosen section, asking, ‘Does this sound right? Does it make sense?’ Encourage kids to rewrite sentences for clarity. They can write them a couple of different ways and choose the version which sounds best and is the clearest. It is wise to set children up in writing partnerships early on in the unit so that they reread their writing together, monitoring for sense, spelling and conventions. Partners can help each other be sure their drafts make sense and convey their ideas to an audience. For example, partners might ask each other, “I was trying to make my reader feel_____. Did you feel that way?” In this way, partners will begin to coach and advise each other on ways to make writing more effective. Often, it is difficult for English language learners to find conventional errors in their writing. They needn’t wait for a sense that something is wrong before they revise sections of a text. You will want to teach them that writers sometimes try different ways to express a section of a story. Encourage them to rework a selected section a few times, trying to write their messages in clearer ways. Partnerships will be especially crucial for our English language learners. Teach them to not “correct” each other’s writing so much as to help each other think about whether the draft sounds right and makes sense. As children work on making their writing more ‘readable’ for their audience, sometimes the content of their writing will suffer. They will be so focused on conventions that they’ll forget to use the elaboration techniques they have learned in their small moment study. They are apt to forget about the need to focus, so their stories no longer have a “small moment” feel. You will want to go back and re-teach strategies from your first moment unit in order to help kids keep their content strong.



November

Unit 3– Realistic Fiction The urge to write fiction begins when children are very young. Allowing children to satisfy this urge taps an energy source, and the result is something to behold. In this unit, help children story-tell and plan stories, perhaps by telling stories first “across their fingers” or in accompaniment with turning the pages of a 5-6 page book. Help students internalize the rhythm and structure of stories and anticipate how stories tend to go by reading many very brief realistic fiction books, including perhaps Peter’s Chair or chapters from Henry and Mudge. Students will learn that characters in stories face problems, overcome these (with help from others or on their own), and then develop solutions. Your students will eventually be able to create their own realistic fiction stories that follow this archetype. In this unit, students will return to their story booklets. Some may start out in three-page booklets, but most will be writing in five-page booklets. After children have drafted a story, they can use single sheets of paper and small strips of paper or flaps to add inserts to their first drafts. It is useful for classroom teachers to develop a class character and a class story during storytelling time, or through shared writing. This shared work can serve as a model, helping kids understand how to create fictional characters and stories. This character can also provide a vehicle for the Active Engagement sections of your minilessons. Teach your students to plan and draft in similar ways as they did for their earlier narratives, sketching pictures across pages and jotting themselves notes about where the problem occurs. Tell them, “Usually a story tells about a character who feels something, and tries for something, but then there’s trouble and the character has to do stuff to try to get out of the trouble…” Children will work on developing trouble and adding tension to their stories by inserting new pages, showing internal thought, or creating actions that slow down the moment. You will teach your students to develop strong endings in which characters solve their troubles. Set your students up to confer with their writing partners to be sure their writing sounds realistic. Sometimes their endings will be abrupt or will seem as if the solution flies in from outer space, separated from the rest of the story. You will want children to ask themselves and each other, ‘Would that really happen?’

Partnership Work in Writing Workshop In this unit, you will want to add to the repertoire of things you see partners doing to help each other. You might want to teach kids to not only compliment each other but to also talk about why writers made the decisions they made. Writing Partners might ask each other, “Why did you do that?” or “What are you trying to do?” Rehearsing writing will still be important. Encourage children to reread one’s writing with a partner and ask, “Does that make sense?” Teach partners to say, “Wait! That doesn’t make sense. What do you want to say?” Students can then re-work the sentence 8 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


together so that it makes sense. Some students might help their partners by saying, “Do you mean…” That can encourage partners to act as problem solvers and language models for each other.



Unit 4- Authors as Mentors December The most important message we give to children during a writing workshop is this, “You are writers, like writers the world over.” It makes sense, then, that for at least one unit of study, children are invited to look closely at the work of one writer and let that writer function as a mentor. When deciding upon the whole-class mentor author, a teacher needs to decide if he or she wants this unit to continue the emphasis on writing personal narratives (or small moments) or does the teacher want to broaden the class’ repertoire by launching the class in doing other kinds of writing. Many teachers in our community have decided to select an author who writes at least one or two texts which are rather like the small moment stories the children have been writing, so that at the start of the unit children are able to use the author to mentor them in this work. But it is also wonderful if the particular author writes other kinds of texts, too. The unit of study, then, can begin with studying an author’s small moment stories and then move to studying other kinds of writing the author has written. Be sure that you know who and what your students have studied in their Kindergarten and 1st grade writing workshops. If students studied Donald Crews or Angela Johnson in previous years, choose a different author to study in 2nd grade. We want to expand our students’ repertoire of literature and help them learn from lots of different authors and pieces of writing. We recommend these authors, among others, as ones who write very short small moment stories and other texts which could be wonderful exemplars for children. Be sure to select an author who will be new (or practically new) to your children.

Angela Johnson Ezra Jack Keats Joanne Ryder Donald Crews

then move to

Joshua’s Night Whispers The Snowy Day One Small Fish Shortcut

then move to then move to then move to

The Leaving Morning, and Do Like Kyla Peter’s Chair and Apt. 3 My Father’s Hands Night at the Fair

Students begin this unit thinking about how writers live wide-awake lives, always paying close attention to the hundreds of rich moments that happen each day that could be a “seed” for their next story. As you read and reread your mentor author’s books with students, you will muse about (and in many cases, invent) ways your mentor author may have done something. Exclaim, “Ezra Jack Keats must have gotten this great idea for his story, Snowy Day, by watching kids play in the snow and jotting down notes.” Or you might say, “I bet Donald Crews got the idea for his story, Sail Away, from one day when he sailed and got stuck in a storm. He must have thought to himself, ‘I need to remember this moment,’ and then jotted it on a notepad.” You want your students to see their own lives as full of these small moments, so you might ask them to begin to carry small notepads (tiny memo pads, or 2” blank squares cut up and stapled together) to record the 10 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


moments that happen throughout each day. You’ll carry your own “tiny topic” notepads, too, and make a rather public show out of taking them out to record the small moments that happen in the classroom. “Oh my goodness!” you might say. “Christian just gave me a poem he wrote for the class. That would make a great story! Let me jot just the words ‘Christian’s poem’ in my tiny topics notepad to hold onto that idea.” Show students how to take brief notes (like “fell down”) and use those to help them remember a moment that they’ll stretch out over their five fingers as they plan their stories with a partner: “I was sliding down the monster slide when Mrs. Martinez yelled, ‘Time to come in! Line up!’ So I stood up at the bottom of the slide and jumped off! Suddenly, I slipped on a rock. Slam! I hit the ground.” Meanwhile, you’ll use your mentor author’s books to marvel over the way your mentor author chooses and stretches out one small moment, instead of running from moment to moment. “Do you see how in Sail Away, Donald Crews doesn’t tell you all about the places where the sailboat traveled and the things people did? He doesn’t tell you all about the swimming they did off the side of the boat, the lunch they ate on the boat, the naps they took, all the animals they saw… He just focuses on that tiny moment when the sailboat was caught in the storm, doesn’t he?” After a few days of collecting moments in tiny topics notepads and writing them across three pages, you will tell students that it can help to study the work of a mentor author like Ezra Jack Keats. You’ll ask students, “What do you notice that Ezra has done in his writing? Why do you suppose he did that? Can you see that technique used somewhere else in his writing?” Our final and most important question, of course, is “Can you try using that technique in your own writing?” Children will start to notice that writers think not only about what they’ll write, but also how they’ll write. While studying the texts in detail, you and your children might notice that your mentor author uses punctuation to grow suspense (ellipses, dash marks or commas), or inserts detailed lists to give readers a clear picture in their minds, or uses short sentences to convey fast actions. We don’t want our young writers necessarily choosing similar topics as our mentor author as much as we want them to use similar techniques to make their own stories come alive. A writer who writes, “I went on the swings. I went high,” might revise her story to build suspense as Donald Crews has done: “I went on the swings. I went higher… and higher… and higher.” Or she might use sensory images to describe the scene, borrowing Jane Yolen’s techniques from Owl Moon. She might write, “Woosh! The trees above me started to sway. The leaves rustled. The sky filled up with dark clouds.” Or this writer might use a comparison like Mem Fox does in Zoo-Looking and write, “I was high in the sky like a bird in fluffy clouds.” It’s helpful to have a few very simple whole-class stories from earlier in the year that can now be revised as you and students practice new craft techniques together. If you feel that your students have had ample experience writing and stretching out small moments in kindergarten and first grade and that they are ready for more than small moment stories, you might explore a new text structure—perhaps the structure some 11 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


teachers refer to as “many moments stories.” Often books are not just one small moment, but, rather, many moments linked together. These stories are like a necklace containing many small beads (moments). Angela Johnson does this in Do Like Kyla when she shows her big idea—how much the little sister wants to be like her big sister—through a series of vignettes: copying her hairstyle, fixing the same breakfast, mimicking her stretching. Show students that they can tell an idea from their life like, “I’m a super soccer player,” and then write a similar sequence of vignettes to illustrate this idea. Students could study the mentor author’s books to notice the craft moves she has used. The final goal of this unit is to encourage independence. One way to foster independence in children is to give them an opportunity in the final days of the study to choose their own mentor author. Children can reflect on that author’s writerly life, the genre choices the author has made, and especially, his or her craft techniques. It is helpful to set kids up with individual craft charts to record what they find as they read, and to then try these same techniques in their own writing. The final message, then, is “Go to it!” resulting in a flurry of voices saying, “I notice…” and “I’m going to try….”



January

Unit 5 – Optional Units of Study: Author Your Own Unit of Study Author Your Own Unit We encourage you to start off the new year by teaching a unit of study that you and your colleagues co-author together. In early December, we’ll lead conference days designed to help you author your own unit of study, and we hope you do so in this month, and then share your unit-of-study with others so that your thinking becomes part of the foundational knowledge that all of us, as a community, draw upon year after year. In March, teachers may want to teach a second one of these optional units, and this time hopefully your teaching can stand on the shoulders of work other teachers have invented during this January Unit-of-Study. When you author a unit of study, think first about what your students will actually be doing in the unit. Will they each write one mega-text (as we’ve become accustomed to students doing when they write All-About books) or will they write a folder-full of texts, revising some of these? Then, think about the muscles that want to support as children do this work. For example, you might tell children that the unit of study is in song writing, but really, your goals might be for children to learn more about reading-writing connections and revision, or, alternatively, about literary language. In every unit, children will progress through the writing process, rehearsing, drafting, revising and editing. In every unit, children will depend on their understanding of the qualities of good writing. Eudora Welty once said, “Poetry is the school I went to in order to learn to write prose.” In this unit, your children might be writing adaptations of fairy tales or they might be writing songs…. but they will be writing whatever they write in order to learn to write any kind of text as well as possible. We will support you in thinking about authoring the units of study described below (you can be sure we will involve some of you in helping to imagine how these might conceivably go!) but of course, you may fashion other units of study that we have yet to imagine. Choose just one of these options! Option A: Literary Non-fiction Option B: Rewriting our Own Versions of Fairy Tales Option C: Letters Option D: Songs Option E: Scripts Literary Non Fiction This unit of study will allow children who wrote All-About books in first grade to explore another way of writing non-fiction texts. The world of non-fiction writing is an enormous one, and in this unit, children will be encouraged to write in all the many forms of non-fiction writing that they find in the world. The unit begins, with children reading 13 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


non-fiction texts as insiders, thinking, “How do these texts tend to go?” and making piles of each representing a different way that non-fiction texts tend to go. For example, children will find that many writers chronicle the story of their coming-toknow about a topic. The resulting texts are sometimes referred to as I-search (as opposed to re-search) texts. You’ll see these books on the shelves of any library. A professional writer might write about how he came to investigate a colony of gorillas, or the writer might chronicle her trip to the Statue of Liberty, weaving information about the Statue into the text. Then, too, children will find that non-fiction writers often pose and then answer questions. Many writers of non-fiction books pattern their texts. While children develop a sense of the array of options before them, they can meanwhile brainstorm in order to decide upon an arena of expertise they want to teach others. As children did earlier in the year with writing all about books, they can think, “What do I know a lot about?” and they can list possible sub-topics they could include when addressing any one topic. This time, however, it is conceivable that teachers may steer children to write about a topic the class has studied during Social Studies or Science. For example, each child could conceivably be writing about the culture and geography of another country. Perhaps most importantly, children can study beautiful picture books, noticing the craft that powerful non-fiction writers use. These children will study authors such as Joanne Ryder, Katherine Lasky, Karla Kushkin, and Jane Yolen, noticing their choice of words, their use of precise detail, their fondness for surprising facts, and children can write their own non-fiction picture books, aspiring to write equally well. This unit will also help children to be more skilled and more flexible readers of nonfiction texts. The unit will help children read these texts, noticing how they are structured. That is, a reader of non-fiction will read differently if this is a narrative, or if this is a question-answer text. This unit will help children appreciate and notice the full diversity of non-fiction writing. Adaptations of Fairy Tales and Folktales Teachers who love children’s literature are well- versed in fairy tales. Adaptations of Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs fill our book shelves, and we’ve loved hearing the familiar tales told from new points of view and seeing them situated in new settings. Children, however, are less well-versed in fairy tales and folktales, and many of them have yet to make the spectacular discovery that the same tale can be told in many ways. This unit allows children to study adaptations of fairy tales in an especially intense and purposeful way—as authors who will, themselves, create their own wild and wonderful adaptations. The unit will rely upon previous read-alouds which immerse children in different versions of a particular fairy tale. One class, for example, may have heard the teacher 14 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


read and reread a traditional version of The Three Little Pigs and then Scieska’s version, told from the point of view of the wolf. Those children, then, might imagine other ways to adapt this story. What if the story involved dogs instead of pigs? What if it were set in New York City and not the country—would the pigs build homes? Or bridges? What if the story had maintained its rural setting but the pigs had been kinder to the wolf? That is—one point of this unit is to help children know ways in which one plot line can be tweaked, stretched, twisted so as to create a host of other stories or adaptations. Of course, teachers can encourage children to think critically about fairy tales, reconsidering whether the hero (or the villain) needs to be a boy, whether it’s the girl who needs to saved by a boy, etc. Meanwhile, however, there is another goal to this unit. When children are invited to borrow and adapt a story they know well, this allows them to use the initial story (and its literary syntax) as a scaffold for their own emerging abilities as storytellers and story writers. That is, a second goal of this unit is to help children incorporate literary language into their writing. This includes writing to create a mood, to develop a scene, to build tension, to dramatize a character. Then, too, we are confident that children will make lots of reading and writing connections when their writing is so closely allied to their reading. A word of caution: This unit MUST invite each child to create his or her very own text. Of course the classroom community will grow ideas together, but the goal is not conformity but creativity. Be sure the child progresses through the writing process as usual; that is, that each writer plans, drafts and revises each of the stories he or she writes. Build a World for Writing: Letter Writing and a Post Office; Song Writing and a Jamboree; Script Writing and a Theater Troupe This optional unit of study gives teachers and children across a grade-level a chance to tackle a writing project and to build a world in which literacy makes all the difference. Some groups of teachers may decide to tackle a letter writing effort, others will take on song writing or script writing, still other teachers will take on something that has yet to be imagined! Either way, teachers will show children how writers go about learning to do a new kind of writing. That is, whatever the genre might be, writers will learn to collect examples of that kind of writing, to notice what those writers tend to do, to imagine the life those writers probably led that allowed them to do this writing…and then children will set out to live similar writerly lives. In some classrooms, children will write letters. Letter writing begins, of course, with believing you have something to say to someone that can make a difference. Perhaps children will first think hard about ways in which we can say those age-old things—I love you, thanks a lot, I wish you the best, good bye, I miss you, here is my news. Of course, these children will be writing in the form which is sometimes referred to as “the friendly letter” but hopefully this time, the instruction will not focus simply on the salutations and the address! Instead, teach children that when we think hard about the person to whom we write, our words can be ones which reach straight to the heart. Teach 15 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


children too, that details matter, and that audience-awareness begins in this most intimate content. Of course, if you decide to teach children to write letters, you will also want to teach children that persuasive letters can make a real-world difference. Tell children stories of the class in New Hampshire that proposed a state-animal and ended up addressing the state assembly. Tell children stories about children who have protested when a park was being turned into parking lot and actually managed to save a patch of earth. Teach children that in order to make a real-world impact, writers need to think very carefully about the arguments that will convince this particular audience, addressing counter arguments. They also need to realize that anecdotes have the power to touch and move people, and to embed anecdotes into arguments, doing so in ways that evoke a response. Songs Songs permeate the environment in which our kids live. Our children are immersed in the songs they hear on the radio, the songs that accompany television shows, the lullabies their grandma sings to them. Some children can recite the lyrics of a song quicker than they can remember their own addresses! If we remind children that songs are literature, just like the stories and poems they write in the writing workshop, then we can use the tune, language, and rhythm in songs to draw our children towards the world of literary language. How important it is to teach kids that they, too, can create beautiful and powerful lyrics…and that these lyrics can reflect the truths of their own lives. We can energize our classrooms so that our students are clapping, humming and memorizing the literary language from each other’s songs. To author this unit, you may want to reread your notes on a poetry writing workshop and think, “How is this the same? How is this different?” Certainly, you will want to be sure to emphasize that songs, like all writing that children do during the writing workshop, need to convey content that matters. Invite children to write songs about things that matter to them. They can write songs about the things that happen to them, the ways they feel, the things they know all about. In your unit, you may teach children that rhythm can help us structure a song and how choruses create cohesion (you may not use that term!). Children can create raps, lullabies, rock songs, or ballads. Youngsters can create songs of protest, songs of happiness, songs celebrating city life. Many children will already have a tune in mind (like Twinkle Twinkle) and write a song to fit that tune. Other kids will write their lyrics and then later add a tune or beat that seem to match the song. After kids have created many songs, you may decide to invite each child to choose a few songs to create his or her own “album.” They may conceivably celebrate by passing out lyrics and teaching each other how their songs can be sung, or by putting their songs to music using those wonderful xylophones that some schools still have!



Scripts Young children are born entertainers. They love dressing up, taking on roles, using funny voices and acting things out. If you give children a chance to both write and direct their very own life stories, while also performing in plays written by their classmates, you will no doubt be a big hit! You can tell children that for this unit, they’ll be playwrights, putting their lives into scenes on the page and then onto the stage. In this unit of study, remind children to bring all they know about stories, characters, and dramatization to their writing. For this kind of writing, teach children that they’ll write both dialogue and stage directions. Children will need to capture dialogue between characters. Young playwrights will decide small, precise actions that children will incorporate into their plays, weaving together action and discipline. Teach children that actors often exaggerate their facial expressions and words to prompt reactions from the audience. You can also teach children to bring viewers into the world of their plays by describing where their stories take place (some children might opt to have a narrator announce the play’s setting: “A sunny afternoon at the playground” or “A snowy hill in the middle of winter, morning.”) Encourage children to draw on their imaginations when they do this. Tell them that playwrights often successfully convey their stories through settings with minimal backdrops and props. You might want to limit the number of props children can use, suggesting that they think of inventive ways to use one thing – a chair, perhaps – to represent many things in their stories. Once they’ve written first drafts of a play, young playwrights will work in partnerships to make sure their dialogue sounds true to life, that actors can follow the cues in the scripts and the audience can settle into the landscape of the play. Toward the end of this unit, playwrights will gather up a set of actors for their play and rehearse the script, thinking about the dialogue, the actions on stage, and the backdrop. As a final celebration, each group of actors will perform for the entire class. You’ll want to encourage children to be quiet during performances, keeping their eyes on the stage and their hands in their laps. You can tell them that at the end of the performance, when the actors take a bow, they’ll have a chance to clap and shout out “Bravo” or “Hoorah.”



February

Unit 6 –Nonfiction Writing: How-To and All-About Books This unit begins by telling children that writers not only use their writing to tell the rich stories of their lives, but also as a way to teach others. There are two ways to teach. Some nonfiction is all-about, and some is procedural. This unit focuses first on the latter. The world is filled with “procedural” writing – cookbooks, instructions for new toys and games, craft projects to make….and so on. You’ll want to immerse children in the sounds of these texts by choosing a few to read aloud and study with students, examining how writers use their words and pictures to teach readers. Some good models of procedural books include “How to Carve a Pumpkin” in The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons, or How to Make a Bird Feeder by Liyala Tuckfield (Rigby Literacy). Just as you used storytelling to help writers develop language that more closely matches the language of good storytellers, coach students to tell and retell class activities in ways that teach others. Children could teach each others how to go across the monkey bars without falling, or how to make flowers out of tissue paper. Teach children not only to use ordinal words to organize their thinking but also that writers use very specific language when they’re teaching. For example, they don’t just write, “Get toothpaste,” but instead they write, “Squirt toothpaste onto the toothbrush.” One of these how-to texts can be written into a class book during interactive or shared writing. Next you’ll help students think of what they know how to do that they could teach others. These will likely be simple things that students do every day, such as ‘How to Make a Good Pancake’ Or, ‘How to Teach Your Dog to Beg.’ For now, steer many of your more struggling students away from difficult procedures; tackling these at this stage will only frustrate them. You will want to teach students that in order to write procedural texts, they’ll need to envision the steps they go through when they perform a given task, seeing it “like a movie in their minds,” and then write each step they see in their “movie.” Often, students will leave out big steps or assume their readers know more than they do. It helps to have students pretend to act out the steps a writer has detailed—ask one partner to read the steps and the other to follow them. If students already have prior experience in writing how-to books, you may choose to deepen their understanding of how-tos by encouraging them to take on more abstract topics such as ‘How to Make a Good Friend,’ or ‘How to Welcome a New Student to the Class.’ They can also choose to publish a collection of how-tos that go together; a book titled How to Play Baseball may include ‘How to Hit the Ball,’ ‘How to Pitch,’ and ‘How to Catch a Ground Ball.’ As students begin revising their pieces, you’ll want them to examine their how-tos for clarity, perhaps thinking more about how readers might perform certain steps. For example a student who has written, “Put your arms by your ears and get ready to dive,” might ask herself, “How? How should I place my arms by my ears? Arms are straight, stretching forward. You should squeeze your elbows to your ears. It should feel like you are hugging them.” Young writers can also incorporate even more conventions of the how-to genre as they revise, such as making their pictures teach even more by 18 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


eliminating extraneous details, zooming in close on the part of the picture that teaches, and using labels and arrows in their pictures. They might add warnings or advice that steer readers out of trouble: “Start pedaling. If you fall to one side, lean the other way.” Students could write introduction pages and revise the endings of their how-tos to let the reader know it’s time to enjoy their hard work: “Eat it all up! Yum!” Celebrate students’ hard work by creating small centers where students can teach a small group of people how-to perform their task, setting up visits with younger children during which your students become the “Teacher-for-a-Day.” You could also hang their how-tos in the hallway with a stapled example of actual materials used or a finished product beside it. Procedural writing isn’t the only way writers teach; they can also teach all about a topic on which they are experts. As you teach this, the unit shifts so that children will each write one long all-about book on a topic of his or her choice. Rather than have children research a new topic, as you’ll teach them to do later on in the year, you can first help children develop new, important non-narrative writing muscles through first exploring the places they go, the things they care about and the things they can do as topics they can teach others. In books such as ‘All About Soccer’ and ‘All About Dogs’ students can easily access content about the things they love or do well, while focusing on learning how to organize and develop their facts. Children will each write a few all-about books on topics of their choice. Encourage them to choose topics about which they are both passionate and knowledgeable. Sometimes finding a good topic takes practice. Often kids think they know a lot on a topic they saw on a TV show. Or they confuse what they want to know about, like the moon – because they like it a great deal – with something they also like and in fact know well, like birthday parties. Children can use graphic organizers such as a web to write down all they know about a topic. They can try out a few topics to see which one will yield the most information and the make the most interesting topic. After students have chosen an everyday topic on which they are ‘experts,’ they need to create a structure to organize everything they know about that topic. All-about books are written in chapters. One way for children to organize and plan for their books is to develop a Table of Contents. You might have them make a picture in their mind of their topic and then think, “What are the parts of my topic?” The chapter titles in a book about soccer might be ‘Soccer Balls,’ ‘Soccer Teams,’ ‘Goalies.’ Or students might ask themselves, “What are different times in my topic?” In this case, the chapter titles might be ‘Soccer Practice’ or ‘Soccer Games.’ This table of contents page will usually be revised as the unit goes on and again at the end of the unit. (Writers don’t always know everything they’ll write before they begin!) It’s helpful if you are modeling and practicing these strategies for students by writing a class book together about a topic the whole class knows, perhaps ‘All About Our School’ or ‘All About Winter.’ Next, children will begin writing their chapters. Pages can be formatted differently to support different ways of organizing informational writing. For example, if a child is 19 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


writing ‘All about Dogs’ and one page is on ‘Training Your Dog to Heel,’ that page will be formulated as a procedural text, and will look much like a ‘how-to’ paper did. Teachers can also teach children to notice and emulate a few other text features of nonfiction writing, such as headings, diagrams, charts, glossaries or a page that shows different kinds of that topic, such as ‘Different Kinds of Dogs.’ You can teach your more proficient writers how to further develop the facts within each section of their book. If a student is writing a chapter titled ‘A Dog’s Body,’ and he writes “Dogs have two ears,” instead of going on to “Dogs have two eyes,” help this child elaborate and say more about his first fact. We might teach him to think, “Hmm… How can I say more about dog ears? Well, they’re pointy and when dogs are surprised or upset, their ears point straight up!” We also might teach them to add their own voice into the text by writing a fact and then responding to it. For example, a student might write, “A dog’s tongue is long and pink. When it licks your hand, it feels wet and sticky. Yuck!” Again, it’s important to model and practice these strategies with readers through shared writing of whole class books. When students have collected a number of pages and chapters for their book, they’re ready to revise. Students can revise by elaborating more on their facts to try to envision what their readers might be confused about, or by responding to questions from a partner. They can also check each chapter for clarity by rereading their pages, stopping after each sentence to think, “Does this go with this chapter?” and if it doesn’t, take it out! Students can revise their pictures to teach their readers more by “zooming in” on specific details or adding labels. Students can also study nonfiction texts and find new ways to revise their pieces based on what “real authors” have done, such as adding “teaching words” (e.g. “for example” or “on the other hand”). You’ll also want students to revise their table of contents to match what they’ve actually accomplished in the unit. As your class gets ready to publish, keep in mind that children need not publish all of the pages they’ve created. Perhaps they’d like to pick just the four or five “best” chapters to place in their books. Children are the world’s best collectors. Just as they love to collect and categorize sea shells, pretty stones, toy cars, and stickers, they love learning that writers collect ideas and information about a topic and then sort it into categories – or chapters. This, combined with children’s natural curiosity and their eagerness to pose as experts, makes this unit of study a popular one.



March

Unit 7 –Writing About Reading (or Independent Writing Projects) We are suggesting that teachers make a decision. You might decide to lead a unit of study on independent writing projects, in which case we ask you to look at the June write-up. Alternatively, you might decide to teach a unit on writing about reading, described below. Writing about Reading When a child returns from a trip to Grandma’s or a day at the beach, we hope she will staple some pages together and sit herself down to record the highlights of that journey. Why, then, would we not want the child who has traveled to where the wild things live to pull out her pen and record memories and thoughts from that journey! In this unit of study, you will introduce children to the glories of writing about reading. You’ll teach children that whenever our memories brim with stories, whenever our minds are on fire with ideas, it helps to capture all of this on the page. A warning. This unit of study is not meant to be “Baby ELA” practice. Your children will spend more than enough time in drills in which they write topic sentences and support those with evidence from the text. Is there really a compelling reason to bring these literary essays into second grade classrooms? Of course seven year olds can write little essays in which they argue that Mudge plays a lot in Henry and Mudge. He plays in the backyard, by the sea, and in Henry’s bedroom. But the fact that children can do these little essays when they are only seven years old does not mean that we need to take the fourth grade curriculum and feed it to these youngsters! So what do we propose for this unit? We have lots of ideas, but mostly we want to issue an invitation for you to join us in exploring the question of what a writing-about-reading unit might entail for second graders. Our hunch is that one purpose of such a unit will be to teach children to read with their minds on fire. So often, third graders tell us they do not have any ideas about their books. That, of course, can’t be true. If we teach second graders to grow ideas – both as they read and as they write about their reading – we’ll insure that youngsters grow up with confidence in their own abilities to have grand ideas about books. Through your read-aloud and your reading workshop, teach children the sorts of ideas that good readers often develop. Teach them that readers notice patterns in books and think about why those patterns exist. Teach them that readers ask questions about books, and then try to answer those questions. Then during the Writing Workshop, give your children time to explore the ideas they first developed during reading. They might write about why a pattern exists or begin to answer the questions they raised as they read. Writing will help them say more about what they were thinking and will push them to ponder and explore their ideas further. If your goal for this unit is to encourage children to grow ideas as they read, you’ll need to think about the form in which they write those ideas. Your students will be using post21 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


it notes to record places in texts where they have ideas. During the writing workshop students can take those starter-ideas and write more about what they were thinking and why it is important. You can teach kids how to look across post-its, thinking about which ones go together and exploring through writing how and why the post-its go together. You may also teach them how to use other graphic organizers to help them sort their ideas into categories. You may teach them, for example, how to use a t-chart to explore an idea that kids had in reading workshop. A student might write about something Mudge did on one side of a page and on the other side, write about how and why a big brother might do similar things. Maybe the student wants to show how Mr. Putter and Henry are alike. He could use a t-chart to explore this idea. You may want to show students that they can use a web to organize and categorize all their different ideas about a character or a topic. Then have them choose one thing on their web to write more about. You can decide whether you want to teach readers specific kinds of writing-aboutreading. Perhaps you want your children to write book reviews that advertise their favorite series books, or letters to an author responding to a particular text. (It will be a more purposeful and authentic experience if students choose authors who are alive today!) Partnership Work in the Writing Workshop You will want partnerships to continue to think about ways of rehearsing and clarifying their writing. You will also want to be sure to align the accountable-talk prompts you are teaching in read aloud, with your writing workshop. You will want kids in their partnerships to ask things like… • • •

Why is that important? Why do you think that? Or maybe …



April

Unit 8 - Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages Poetry allows writers to let their hearts and minds soar. It also lets children practice all that they’ve learned thus far in the year. That is, young poets will find significance in the ordinary details of their lives, employ strategies of revision, and learn from mentor authors in order to write many, many poems. In this way, poetry will not be an esoteric unit of study done to end the year, so much as a culmination of a year’s learning and an opportunity to use language in extraordinary ways. This unit begins with a week of poetry centers. During this week, children are not actually writing poetry; instead, they work in centers which provide them the opportunity to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of poetry. In one center, children will observe everyday objects, such as rocks, seashells, and math manipulatives with a poet’s eye, by drawing and writing what they see in a fresh way. For example, a child might say a green feather is like a mini tree. In another center, children will read poems with beautiful imagery, such as “Silence” by Eve Merriam, and then draw or paint what they see in their mind’s eye. You might hang your students’ paintings or sketches next to the poem they tried to illustrate, marveling at how all of their images are different. Another center could set children up to collect their favorite poems and to paste these into their very own poetry anthologies. In a beautiful language center, children could pull out their favorite literary lines from picture books and write these on sentence strips or book marks. A child in a classroom that had one such center used the book The Moon Was the Best by Charlotte Zolotow and Tana Hoban, and wrote the line, “The fountains sprayed water in a curving white mist over prancing horses.” Once children begin to write poems, you can help them learn that their poems can be filled with meaningful topics and feelings. For this unit, children will revive their “TinyTopic Notepads” from the Authors as Mentors unit and use these to find poems hiding in the details of their lives. To help children learn about powerful uses of language, have them experiment with using line breaks to convey meaning. You might put each word from a class poem created during shared writing on index cards, and then use a pocket chart to show the class that changing the placement of the words changes the feeling of the poem. By the end of this study, your poets will be able to create clear images with precise and extravagant language. They’ll think about the difference between ‘fry’ and ‘sizzle,’ ‘shine’ and ‘sparkle,’ ‘cry’ and ‘weep.’ You’ll show them how poets use language and metaphors in powerful ways to convey the meaning and feeling behind their poems. You’ll teach children to make comparisons so as to give their readers pictures in their minds.



May

Unit 9 – Writing in a Content Area: All-About Books It is very important that children first have written an all-about book on a topic of personal expertise before entering this next unit, Writing in a Content Area. In this unit, they will learn how to research information from a content area study in science or social studies and write what they learn into books designed to teach readers. Before children can write about a content area topic, they need to have developed some expertise on that topic. They will have already read many texts on it. You will help students realize that now they can teach each other about their content area topic just as they earlier taught readers in their all-about books. In the beginning of the unit, children think about what they already know about their thematic topic and then use their reading workshop notes to help them imagine the chapters that will go in their all-about books, by sorting their post-its into categories. For example, a book about whales might have pile-of-post-its that describe where whales live and what they eat. These piles of notes can become chapters. Students will learn to plan chapters and then to support those chapter headings with facts and information from their research. They will have ‘different kinds of’ pages, a ‘how to’ page, Question and Answer pages, and more. Of course they will incorporate features of nonfiction into their books. For example, one student used his wonderings and jottings from reading workshop to help him write a question-answer page in writing workshop. During an ocean study, in reading workshop he wrote on his post-it, “Why do whales have blow holes?” He read on to answer his question and then wrote what he found. In writing workshop he used his jottings to help him make a question-answer page. At the top of the page he wrote, “Why do whales have blow holes” and underneath he wrote the information he had found. At the end of the unit, children can revise their all-about books by elaborating on their facts. One teacher taught her students to elaborate by making comparisons. A student of hers reread a line he’d written that said, “A bee is tiny” and he added, “just like a penny or a dime.” Another teacher taught her students to elaborate on their facts by adding personal commentary. One of her students had written, “Sharks have really sharp teeth.” She added, “Make sure not to get too close to a shark because it would really hurt!” After revising their all-about books, children choose one all-about book to fancy up. We teach children to write an introduction to their all-about book as a way to grab their readers’ attention and interest. In their introduction, we’ll teach children to summarize what their book is about and why people should read it. Be aware that some children will be eager to copy straight out of the texts they read. It is essential to demonstrate both how to paraphrase and how to use books on revision to reread and check your facts. You might teach kids how to use the pictures in their books to inspire new thoughts they might include. Periodically, you will want to let children teach their partners what they are learning so that they bring their own voice into their writing. As they revise their writing, be sure they are adding information to the facts they 24 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


collected and drafted. Have them talk more about these and show why they are important to their topic, giving examples that elaborate on the facts. This unit will end with a writing celebration during which students can share what they have learned. You may decide to invite other classrooms into your community to sit with your writers so that these children, too, can learn about the topics that your class studied. This unit parallels the units: Reading within a Thematic Study and Readers Can Research Topics of Interest (non-fiction interest centers) in the Reading Calendar. Partnership Work in the Writing Workshop Putting all we know together… By now you’ve been teaching partners to think about ways to rehearse and clarify their writing. Kids know to compliment each other, to use accountable talk prompts (“What do you mean?” “Say more about that,” “Why is that important?” “Why do you think?” “Maybe…”) to ask each other questions in order to clear up confusing parts and to get at the heart of what each person is trying to show. They know to rehearse their writing by practicing what they will say and by reworking sentences or paragraphs of their writing. You can teach partners how to help each other find not only the strong parts but the parts to work on longer. Partners can make suggestions of things the other might do to make his or her writing stronger.



June

Unit 10 – Independent Writing Projects or The Craft of Revision In this unit, we lay out two different options. Both are exciting to us – you choose. Independent Writing Projects All year long, you will have convened children around writing projects that you and other teachers have invented. Now is the time to gather your youngsters together and to tell them that for the whole next month, they’ll have a chance to invent their own writing projects. “You know how earlier in the year, I suggested that we could all write small moment stories? And then I suggested we could all study an author and try to write like that author? Well now it is your time to invent your own wonderful ideas for the sort of writing you’d like to do.” Before you issue this invitation, think a bit about the choices you hope children make because of course, it is very easy to steer children. Do you hope children reflect o all the kinds of writing they’ve studied together and select one of those kinds of writing to now work on with independence? Or do you hope children pore over texts that they find in their world thinking, ‘I could write just like that!’ Do you hope children take on a cause—say, convincing the school to spruce up the playground—and that they write in order to make a read world difference. You will be able to channel children towards whatever it is you imagine, and therefore take the time to think through your priorities. In any case, in this unit, children will not all progress in step with each other through a synchronized writing process. This means that you will need to teach children that they need to be their own writing teachers, giving themselves assignments. Their first step, for example, will be to choose (or design) the kind of paper that makes sense for the writing project the child has in mind. Remind them that writers always take time to plan for writing, to write rough drafts, to revise our writing, and then to edit our writing. Remind children that sometimes writers take on the project of writing one very long and involved writing project, one which requires days and days of work, and that other times writers collect folders full of writing, then select our best and especially revise our best work. Although every child will be working on very different projects, you’ll still find lots of room for instruction. For example, every writer always finds it helpful to have a mentor text beside us as we write and to think, “What did this other author do that worked well?” “How could I borrow that strategy in my own writing?” Children can also be reminded that the characteristics of good writing are fairly stable across genre. Whether they are writing directions or writing songs, it is important to write with precise, exact words, to reread to make sure the meaning is clear, to answer readers’ questions as one writes. One of the great joys of this unit will be the fact that children will emerge as different, one from the next. You will definitely want to capitalize on this. If one child writes a 26 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


gigantic book of jokes and another writes a screen play, let each child become famous for what he or she has done, developing the identity of “I am a particular kind of writer.” Teach children that whenever they write for readers, they need to make sure they write with punctuation, that they spell words as completely as they can. The Craft of Revision Writing is a powerful tool for thinking precisely because when we write, we can take fleeting and intangible memories, insights and images, and make them concrete. When we talk, our thoughts float away. When we write, we put our thoughts onto paper. We can stick them in our pocket. We can come back to them later. We can reread our first thoughts and see gaps in them. We can look again and see connections between two different sets of ideas. Through rereading and revision, writing becomes a tool for thinking. A commitment to revision is part and parcel of a commitment to teach writing as a process. Watch a child at work making something—anything—and one sees revision. The child pats a ball of clay into a pancake to make a duck pond, and then revises the duck pond by creating a fingertip rainstorm that dapples the water’s surface. Young children revise block castles to add protected hiding spots for archers, and they revise pictures of spaceships to add explosions. They revise clay rabbits to make one ear droop. Young children can revise their writing with equal ease and enthusiasm—as long as we don’t expect their revisions to look like those a grown-up would make. Second graders can revise—as long as we expect their seven-year-old best! The beauty of this unit comes when our students see how their writing gets stronger because of the many ways they learn to revise. Materials and tools always seem to be an issue when it comes to revision. Tell kids that part of the fun is using their very own special tools! Giving kids a revision folder and a color pen usually motivates them to bring zealous energy to the job of revising writing. You will want to be sure that children have access to strips of paper to add sentences and sections into the middle of their writing, flaps of paper to tape over neglected parts of the story, and single sheets of paper to staple onto the end or the middle parts of their stories. You may also want your children to have access to post-it notes, tape, staplers and scissors during writing workshop. At the beginning of this unit, children learn that revision is a compliment to good work. The unit will begin with children selecting their best pieces from the fall, putting these in a special revision folder, then revising each one further. Children learn revision strategies, including cutting, stapling, adding into the middle of a page, re-sequencing. It is important to teach students not only the physical work of revision, but also the reasons for altering a draft. Adding details is an important part of revision. Show kids how to reread their pieces thinking about which part is the most important. Often, this part will be the very thing 27 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.


that made them want to tell their story in the first place. If kids are having a hard time figuring out the most important part of a story, they might ask themselves, ‘Where in my story do I have the biggest feelings?’ This is the part we want students to stretch out with details that spotlight what makes this moment so essential. For example, a student rereading a story he wrote about cooking arroz con pollo with Grandma on Saturday, might realize that the most important part happened when he and his grandmother smelled something burning. This, then, is the part of the story he will want to further develop, adding in dialogue and small actions that show his feelings. You can always, of course, remind your writers of previous revision strategies they used in Small Moments and Writing for Readers. You may also want to teach students to add new beginnings or endings. Show kids that they can try writing a few different versions of any part of their story, and then think about which version works best. One way to have them try out new beginnings or endings is to study some mentor texts the class has read. Being able to name what the writer did in his or her beginning or ending can be useful steps for young writers who are working on their own beginnings and endings. For example, children might reread the ending of Fireflies and recognize that Brinckloe ends the piece with a strong feeling. They could then try this in their own piece. They might notice that an author starts off her writing by describing the setting. In addition to revising narratives, teachers may decide to have kids revise their writing from other genres too. For example, kids could revise their All About books by thinking about what else they could teach the reader. They could also revise poetry by rethinking the ending and adding more feelings. This is a time for the class to think about all of the ways they have learned to make their writing even better, and to have fun revising. Partnerships can meet and show each other places they revised. They can help each other plan possible revision strategies and read and reread their stories together thinking more deeply about their pieces. This unit ends with a celebration of the many ways the students have learned to revise, and with the knowledge that these revision strategies will continue to help children as they write forever and ever.
