DRAFT Teachers College Reading and Writing Project 3 rd Grade Writing Curriculum

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1 A Rationale and Overview of the Suggested Curriculum This curricular calendar suggests one possible way of imagining the writing curriculum for third grade classrooms. You will see that we suggest month-long units of study, and that the design of this curriculum places a premium on supporting youngsters growing abilities to write narrative, informational, and poetic texts. The plan also provides some early support towards helping children begin to write expository (or persuasive) texts, starting with persuasive letters and a simplified form of literary essay. The plan we propose was fashioned with input from hundreds of teachers, coaches and principals, and very much relies upon Units of Study in 3-5 Writing (Heinemann, May 2006.) This curriculum takes into account New York State assessments; if you teach in a different state, you will need to adjust this plan according to your assessments. This year-long curriculum is part of a school-wide K-8 spiral curriculum. We envision that across the K-2 grades, children will work in progressively more complex way, writing narrative, informational (all-about), procedural (how-to) and poetic texts. In third grade, procedural writing will probably move from the writing workshop to the science and math classroom. Meanwhile, children will begin to learn about writing expository (or persuasive) texts, as well as continuing their work with other structures of writing. This instruction can enable children to work in each of these fundamental structures with increasing sophistication and decreasing reliance on scaffolds. For example, whereas first graders write small moment stories by recalling an event and retelling it across their fingers, third graders do similar work at a more advanced level when they make and revise timelines, considering and reconsidering where, in the sequence of events, they will begin and end their stories. Third graders also ask, What is the heart of my story? and elongate that section of it. This work sets them up for the essay writing they ll eventually do. In a similar way, students will become progressively more capable of writing informational texts and move towards expository ones. Although the suggested K-8 curricula varies according to grade level so that it supports increasing sophistication, it is also true that the skills a person must use in order to write well are remarkably consistent whether that writer is seven years old, 1

2 seventeen years old or seventy years old, for that matter. All of us try again and again to write with focus, detail, grace, structure, clarity, insight, honesty, and increasing control of conventions and do so by rehearsing, planning, studying exemplar texts, drafting, rereading, revising, re-imagining, and editing. There is nothing inevitable about this particular way of unrolling a sequence of writing units of study. There are lots of other ways in which teachers could plan their writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study for third graders because first, we believe it is a wise trajectory, one that stands on the shoulders of the work these children will have done in the preceding year and sets them up for fourth grade. Because this one journey of study was fashioned with input from hundreds of teachers and coaches, and develops essential skills that students need, we believe it is worth careful consideration. The other reason we lay out this single line of work is that the s conference days and coachcourses cannot provide close support for hundreds of different iterations of a writing curriculum. We therefore want to alert you that during the year ahead, the Project s writing-related conference days for third grade teachers will support this particular line of work. Conference days will precede the units of study by at least a week, if not by two weeks. On the other hand, nothing matters more in your teaching than your own personal investment in it. Alter this plan as you wish so that you feel a sense of ownership over your teaching. We do encourage you, however, to work in sync with your grade-level colleagues so that your teaching can benefit from your cumulative knowledge, and so that your grade-level meetings can be times for swapping minilesson ideas, writing together in ways that inform your teaching, assessing student work, and planning ways to respond to what your children are doing. Assessment This year, we expect that all teachers across a school will agree upon a shared schoolwide form of tracking student growth in writing. Specifically, we will help you to track individual writers growth in narrative and informational/essay writing and to also track students increasing control of writing conventions. You will see that we ve set aside specific times in the year for formative assessments; we ll provide more information about recommended assessments soon. Your first assessments need to occur either at the start of this year. Your children come to you with competencies and histories as writers. You cannot teach well unless you take the time to learn what children already know and can do, allowing you to tailor your teaching so that you remind children to use all that they already know and help them reach towards goals that are within their grasp. We recommend you devote two days to a writing-on-demand assessment of narrative writing. It is important to not scaffold kids work during this assessment (anymore 2

3 than you do during a running record assessment of reading). By September, we ll provide you with a rubric for assessing (and tracking) children s abilities to write narrative writing. This will be available on our website: Of course, you don t want to say to children, Welcome to a new year. I want to begin by evaluating you. Therefore, you may tell students you can t wait until the end of September in order to have some of their writing to display on bulletin boards. Because you want their voices and stories around the room right from the start, ask students to do a quick cycle of their best writing work. You will probably want to ask them to write a true story of a small moment (or of one time ) that was important to them. Let children know they won t have a chance to work long on this piece (because you are so urgent to have their stories up in the room), and so they ll need to plan, draft, revise and edit in just two days. The writing can soon fill your bulletin boards; meanwhile you can study it to develop a base-line understanding of what your students know about the writing process and the qualities of good narrative writing. As you look over their work, look for some evidence that children are writing focused narratives. Are they writing chronologically structured pieces? Can these pieces be described as stories; that is, does the main character (the writer, in this instance) proceed through a plot-line of actions? Are children storytelling rather than summarizing and commenting on events? Are they using direct dialogue and including details? Writing with end punctuation? Do they appear to care not only about what they write, but also about how they write it? Grammar in the Writing Curricular Calendar When you embark on the teaching of grammar for the year you want to find out what your students know; which is often more than we realize. There are two main ways to do this: one way is to listen to their oral speech patterns, the second is to observe what you see in their writing. Several interwoven quick assessments can inform your teaching. These assessments might entail listening to student conversations in the classroom and in informal spaces around the school such as the playground and lunch room, and examination of students writing. Finally, teachers can listen during reading assessments as students read aloud, noting how they notice or ignore punctuation as they read. From listening to students, teachers may note a student s understanding of verb tense. Often, if you look just at their writing, you will come away thinking they understand very little about tense, and you will despair of how much you need to teach them. When you listen to them on the playground, however, you may find that they tell stories about their weekend or about sporting events consistently in past tense, and they talk about plans for the upcoming weekend consistently in future tense. If you overhear a cell-phone conversation about an event that is happening at that time, you may find this will be in present tense. So, you may find that their understanding of verb tense is intuitive but deep, and that it is just not showing up in their writing. 3

4 This means you may bring oral role-playing into the classroom, showing children what it sounds like when they use past, present, and future tense in these kinds of conversations, and then teaching them how writers, too, choose a tense for a purpose. Then you can teach them verb endings but you didn t have to start that instruction from nowhere, assuming they knew nothing about tense. In writing, you may observe if students seem to be trying to commit to a tense but they just need to be more consistent or they need support learning the verb forms. The important thing, thus, is to assess students control of spoken and written conventions, and to use this knowledge to plan effective lessons. You also need to plan a curriculum of grammar that will be infused into writing workshop. You probably want to start the year by assessing and then teaching (if needed), capitalization, and then ending punctuation. If this is a recall lesson for students, make it a real writing lesson by teaching how ending punctuation, and perhaps punctuation in general, affects tone in our writing. Students begin the year writing personal narratives, so it makes sense to teach them how to punctuate dialogue. You need to teach all students to write in paragraph structure. Next, teach students to read over their writing, and where a thought or action ends, to put a period this will quickly and with a minimum of fuss eliminate a lot of run-on sentences. In the second narrative unit, you may want to teach students to use what they have learned about conventions so far (beginning and ending punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, punctuating dialogue) as they write in their notebooks and their drafts. You may teach some new punctuation then, such as the use of commas in lists. You will want to teach pronouns and subject-verb agreement. In the third unit, teach students to recall these conventions as they turn to non-narrative writing. You may want to re-teach ending punctuation, showing how it affects the tone of non-narrative writing. You will want to re-teach paragraph structure in non-narrative writing. You may choose to teach what makes a sentence by seeing if their sentences sound like sentences to them when they read them aloud. Always, teach students to use all the conventions they have learned so far to be effective editors of their own and others writing, and to write drafts that are more accurate in terms of conventions. This preparation also prepares them for the ELA exam. After the exam, as students return to writing story, this might be a good time for them to look closely at verb tense and verb forms, including regular and irregular verbs. If students have control of simple sentences, then teach them how to punctuate more complicated sentences by adding simple clauses set off by commas and/or conjunctions. Be sure to assess students for how they are using conventions now in their notebook entries and in their first drafts. If needed, form small groups around any convention that merits more attention. For example, in a small group you can help students who get confused distinguishing singular and plural pronouns. 4

5 Students benefit if they have opportunities to pay attention to punctuation in reading, in read aloud, shared reading, and when they read aloud. You may also wish to conduct a few punctuation inquiries. During inquiries students look closely at how published authors use punctuation through a close investigation of their writing. The most common method of instruction entails explicit teaching in the form of a minilesson during the writing workshop where students are taught strategies for punctuation usage and then have opportunities to try them out in their writing. You may need extra time for the grammar work, especially for pronoun and verb forms, and we recommend including this work in your word study time. Third Grade Writing Calendar September October November December January February March April May June Launching a Productive Writing Workshop Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing Writing Information Books with Authority and Voice Writing About Reading and Writing Simple Literary Essays to Prepare for the ELA Exams ELA/Fiction Fiction Revision Poetry Return to Nonfiction Independent Writing Projects 5

6 Unit 1 Launching a Productive Writing Workshop: Cycling Through the Writing Process in Writer s Notebook September Introduce Writers Notebooks and Teach Third Graders a New Version of the Writing Process September is always a challenging month because we inevitably work towards two rather different goals: we want to establish a well-managed, productive classroom and we want to rally children to work with enthusiasm on projects of great importance. This unit of study is designed to launch a writing workshop that is well-managed enough that children can proceed with some independence. You will want to explicitly teach children learn the structures and rituals of a writing workshop. Don t skimp on instruction geared towards helping children learn to gather efficiently for a minilesson, to sit and listen throughout it, to turn and talk with a partner at the designated moment. Explicitly teach children to get started on writing without waiting for an individualized jump-start from the teacher. Teach them also to work past the hard parts, and to rely on one another as well as on themselves. Teach them to not interrupt your conferences (but to stand close and listen in). If you are going to be able to teach children well, you need them to be able to carry on with enough independence that you will have time to teach. In the third grade writing workshop, September is especially important because this is the time to induct children into a more sophisticated version of the writing process than anything they have experienced. Whereas in second grade, most children planned narratives simply by storytelling their pieces across pages in a booklet, this year children will spend much more time rehearsing for writing. They will do this first by living like writers, seeing their whole lives as material for writing and gathering lots of quick-write entries (each of which will be a narrative) in their writers notebooks. Rehearsal will continue as each child chooses one of these entries as a seed idea to develop. Even before drafting that idea, third graders will make and revise their timelines and leads for their story ideas, and they ll do this in their writer s notebooks. You will not only teach children this much-more elaborated form of rehearsal for writing, but also teach children a more elaborated form of revising writing. For third grade teachers at the start of the year, the twin challenges of establishing a productive classroom and of rallying children to work with enthusiasm around important projects will be embodied by your effort to launch writers notebooks (and the writing process which those notebooks represent). Without clear teaching and clear models of what a writer s notebook is, third graders won t be clear what a writer s notebook is and is not. They will correctly assume that the entries they collect at the start of a narrative unit resemble rough-draft versions of true stories, but without your help, they won t understand that once an entry has been selected as a seed idea, the writer s notebook now changes and becomes a workbench, a place where writers try-out various things in preparation for writing a draft. That is, they 6

7 will need you to help them understand that between selecting a seed idea and starting a draft, writers experiment with a variety of time lines and leads, and write entries musing about the piece they will soon draft. Children will also need you to clarify that when they do write drafts outside the notebook, those drafts are not recopied or corrected versions of the original entries they are, instead, attempts to write literature. All the rehearsal, storytelling, mulling over, reading-before-writing will culminate in the writers attempts to draft really spectacular stories. In order to teach students this cycle of writing, it is especially important that you keep writer s notebooks, and use these to model a deep love for that notebook. Perhaps you ll say to children, This summer I tried living like a writer, and my writer s notebook was an incredibly important tool for me. Let me walk you through my notebook and show you some of the things I did that you ll want to do too. You will definitely want to spend a bit of time inviting children to decorate their notebooks. Help children care about this crucial tool! It would be a terrible thing if children regarded their writer s notebooks as just another form of school work. Keep in mind that in second grade, children wrote half a dozen stories each month. Your youngsters will not yet have the planning or revisions skills to invest an entire month in writing one single piece of writing! If you launch the September writing workshop with the expectation that children will stretch their work out so they spend the entire month working to produce just one piece of writing, chances are that the volume of writing your children produce will bottom-out, resulting in third grade becoming less rigorous than second grade! Don t let this happen. Volume of writing and stamina for writing are enormously important. If you aim in September for children to persevere around an effort to produce just one single as-good-as-possible piece, you will probably end up with children sitting over the same story for days, fiddling with it. Instead, we strongly suggest you plan from the start to help children work through two cycles of writing of personal narrative in September, keeping in mind that October will allow you to lift the level of your children s narrative writing. Expect that both of a child s September pieces of writing will illustrate that child s level of work at the start of the year it is just fine if the narratives aren t yet too great. Think of how much better the work will get as the year proceeds! Teach Strategies for Generating Narrative Writing and Teach also the Concept that Writers Draw from a Tool-Kit of Optional Strategies Of course, at the start of this year (as at the start of every year,) you will want to help your children know that their lives are brimming with stories. Second graders tended to generate story-ideas almost effortlessly, but sometimes as children get older, they begin to fret over finding good ideas. For this reason, we usually teach third graders a couple of strategies for coming up with ideas for personal narrative stories. These strategies not only give children ways to think up stories, they also channel children towards writing focused, chronological narratives. 7

8 Many of us have found that it is helpful to teach children that writers sometimes think of a person who matters to us, then list several small moments we ve experienced with that person, choosing one of these to write as a story. Then, you can teach children that writers sometimes do this work by starting not only with a person who matters to us but with a place which matters or an object which matters. The important thing for you to realize when you teach children this strategy is that you are teaching them not only one particular strategy, you are also teaching them how writers use strategies for generating focused narratives. Be sure to demonstrate that writers take 5 minutes (only) to jot down a person who matters to us and to list a few small moments we ve spent with that person. This process of brainstorming does not encompass one day s writing workshop! Also be sure that when children list small moments that have spent with a person, each moment is described in a sentence (or a long phrase) not in a single word. If a child writes Joe and under that name writes baseball, that child is not set up to produce a focused narrative. But if under the name Joe, the child writes, one time Joe taught me how to catch a baseball then the child is off to a good start towards writing a narrative. The other important thing to teach children right away is that in a single day of writing, the child does not produce just one entry. The child uses a strategy to generate an idea for writing, writes an entry, and then returns to the original brainstorming work or does a bit more, before moving on to a second entry. It is crucial that one day s teaching cumulates or adds onto the previous day s teaching. That is, if on Monday we teach children that writers sometimes think of a person who matters to us and brainstorm small moments we spent with that person, moments we remember with crystal clarity, and then on Tuesday, we teach that writers similarly can think of a place we remember well, brainstorming small moments we spent in that place, and then choosing one to write in detail, at the end of that minilesson, it will be important to set children up to draw on either of those strategies in order to generate that day s writing. It is crucial that each day s teaching cumulates with those that have gone before it, and that during the workshop, children draw on their expanding repertoire of strategies. Keep in mind that children do not need more than three strategies for generating personal narratives. If every day you use your minilesson as a time to teach a new strategy for generating writing, you will (alas) end up using these strategies just as some teachers use story starters. The message you inadvertently convey will be this: Wait until I can get you started on today s piece of writing. It is crucial that children can instead use and reuse their small repertoire of strategies, and do so with independence. Then, too, it is important that children begin to rely less and less on strategies for generating writing, and that they come to regard life itself as one big source of stories! As soon as your children are living like writers, they ll find that true stories come to mind without reliance on a particular strategy at all. Everything that a person sees and does can remind us of the stories we have to tell. 8

9 Homework This leads to the issue of homework. By third grade, children are old enough to be doing some writing homework each night. But at the start of third grade, teachers may worry that children are not attached yet to their writers notebooks nor accustomed enough to carrying texts between home and school for it to work well for children to carry their notebooks between home and school in order to write in them each night. Therefore we encourage you to make or buy small, portable Writerly Life Notepads which can be disassembled at the end of a week, with pages taped into the writers notebooks. If this means children write at home as well as school, this will double the volume of writing that children do. Help children remember to bring these Notepads between home and school so they induct children into the very important habit of carrying writer s notebooks back and forth between home and school. Qualities of Good Narrative Writing As you teach strategies for generating writing, you will also be teaching qualities of effective writing. Few things will help children more than learning to write with focus and detail. It is likely that third graders have had experience doing this in second grade, but you will want to re-teach these concepts. Specifically, in this first unit, you will probably want to celebrate the fact that stories of significance can be found in the smallest and most ordinary occasions. Perhaps after children throng back into the classroom after lunch, you will want to help them choose one small story from all the many that occurred while they were eating and tell that story as well as possible to their partners. This won t, probably, be a story that children select as the seed idea to develop across time, but this little exercise can help students reexamine the everyday routines of their lives in search of stories that have humor, beauty, and drama. Some children will need to be taught the essentials of narrative writing. Depending on their second grade writing experiences, some will need to learn that narratives are just that stories. In a personal narrative, one character (presumably the writer) experiences one thing, then the next, then the next. These texts are usually chronologically ordered. Children also learn that their narratives will be more effective if the writer has zoomed in on a small episode, That is, in this unit children will be reminded of the simple form of focus which they should recall from their previous writing workshop. With reminders, children can write entries in which they retell not the entire visit to grandma s but rather the portion of their visit when the cat got loose. The main reason to zoom in is that this makes it more likely that the writer will relive an episode with enough detail that the reader, too, can experience the event. This leads me to mention one of the few nonnegotiable qualities of effective narrative writing. This is the hard-to-describe (and hard-to-achieve) quality that some teachers refer to as writing in the moment or making a movie in your mind. If a child talks 9

10 all about an event summarizing it with sentences like It was a good baseball game. We won 6 to 2. I got a lot of hits. It was exciting then the child is commenting on the game rather than telling the story of it. The child has not yet grasped the idea of writing in a storyteller s voice. If, on the other hand, his piece begins, I grabbed a bat and walked up to the plate. I looked at the pitcher and nodded. I m ready, I said, then the child is writing a story. Touchstone Texts As children learn about narrative writing, some of the lessons will be explicit, taught in minilessons and conferences. But some of the lessons will be implicit, gleaned as children study texts that sound like those you hope they will soon write. Even just one dearly loved and closely studied text can infuse a writing workshop with new energy. If children have not yet studied Knuffle Bunny (Willems), Shortcut (Crews), or Owl Moon (Yolen), then we recommend those texts. If they have studied these, you might invite them to study Statue, or another excerpt from Ralph Fletcher s new memoir, Marshfield Dreams. Teach Children to Choose Seed Ideas, to Rehearse for the Drafts They Will Write, and to Write in Small Booklets After children generate narrative entries for a week (or longer, if you envision children writing just one piece in the first month,) you will want to teach them to reread these and to choose one entry that they can develop into a seed idea. You may want to teach children that writers often timeline our stories, and then revise those timelines. Which dot on the timeline is not essential to the heart of the story? Which dot needs to be expanded (by slowing time down) into a series of dots? Timelines are only useful if they are drafted and revised! You may want to teach children that writers often start a story with dialogue or with a small action. Invite them to write several different leads. The real purpose of this instruction is not just to get a more dramatic lead. Instead, this is a technique that usually dislodged children from summarizing events and moves them toward making movies in their minds and reliving the event on the page. Also, if children take a day to draft and revise leads, this gives you a chance to teach into the start of their stories, making it more likely that children are storytelling rather than summarizing. Once a child has drafted and revised a timeline which outlines the sequence of the event, the child will want to use this timeline as a scaffold around which to build an elaborated story. The great risk is that if one dot on the timeline says, Put on my roller skates and the next dot says, skated with my father the child s story will end up like this: I put on my roller skates and then I skated with my father. You will need to teach children, then, that a writer rereads the first item on a timeline: put on my roller skates. The writer makes a movie in his mind of exactly how this 10

11 happened. What did the writer do or say first? What exactly (it is okay to invent what you probably did or said!) Now the writer storytells: I arrived early at Skate Key, carrying my roller skates. All the benches were empty so I sat on the first one I saw. I shoved one foot then the next into a roller skate, and pulled the strap tight around my ankle. The skates felt tight and I wondered if my feet had grown. I wiggled my toes. They felt okay. Then and only then, the writer can progress to the second dot on the timeline! After children have elaborated stories by pointing to a dot, making a movie in their minds of the story represented by that dot, and telling this story in detail to a partner, then progressing in a similar way through the other dots, you ll want to encourage each child to transfer the dots of the storyline onto a folded over sheet of paper, with the first dot at the top of the first half page, then the next dot at the top of the next half-page.soon the child will be writing a narrative, with the story of each dot occupying each page of the booklet. Using Conventions While Drafting As children write, take a second to check that they are writing with end punctuation, capitals, and with high frequency words. This isn t a time to worry that their use of sentence punctuation is perfect (that can come during editing) but periods aren t an add-on, inserted just prior to publication! If children do not have the instinct to punctuate, teach them that writers have a thought, then write-write write- that thought without pausing (not writing word-by-word) and then put a period at the end of the thought. Then the writer generates the next thought, writes that thought down all in a rush, punctuates that thought. You will, of course, have a separate time in your day for word study and during that time, you will no doubt teach children some high-frequency words. In order to decide on the words to teach, get hold of a list of high-frequency words for second graders (Pat Cunningham s book is one source of this list) and notice which of those words many of your students do not yet seem to have mastered. Start with those! The word wall is not a place for new and fancy vocabulary or for social studies words it is a place for the high frequency or high-utility words that you plan to teach and then hold children accountable to always spelling correctly. In a mid-workshop interruption, ask writers to just take a second to reread their writing and check that they ve spelled words on the word wall correctly. Because you guys are in third grade, and third graders take just an extra second to be sure we spell the words we almost know correctly. This does not mean you expect children s first draft writing to be entirely correct, or that you want them obsessing about spelling in their first draft. You do, on the other hand, want to be sure that some high frequency words are becoming automatic for them. 11

12 Revision DRAFT Once your children have written one draft of a story (which will probably take them two days) then you ll want to teach them to revise. If they are not yet incorporating direct dialogue into their stories, teach them to make characters talk by adding in the exact words that a character (that is, probably, that the child) was apt to have said. On the other hand, if children are already writing with exact dialogue, chances are their narratives are swamped with dialogue. You may want to use the wonderful picture book Yo!Yes! to teach children that a stream of dialogue alone doesn t make sense. In that book, a character says Yo! The font and the picture conveys the rest of the story, so that the reader thinks, Yo! the sporty basketball player shouted, pointing towards a little nerdy kid. When children write narratives, they can t rely on the pictures to carry the actions and intonation, and therefore they need to add this into their texts. Then, too, you will probably want to teach children that writers reread our stories, locating what we believe is the heart of the story, and we stretch that part out, progressing in smaller steps through the sequence of events, writing in more detail. Now or later, you can teach children that we not only tell the external sequence of events but also the internal events what we noticed, remembered, thought Teach and Scaffold Children to Cycle Back through the Process a Second Time, then to Select their Best Draft to Revise and Edit Once you have spent two weeks shepherding your class along through the process of writing one story, you may want to help the class look back on the stages of the process that they ve experienced. You can create a whole-class white-board chart so that the next time the children progress through the writing process, each child can rely on the chart for help in anticipating, planning for and even initiating some of the stages of the writing process. In this way, you ll support independence from the start! Usually these charts have a column in which to place magnets that signify which child is gathering entries, and another column containing the magnetic name cards of children who are choosing a seed idea. There are also columns for developing the idea, drafting, revising and editing. Using this chart can help children progress with more independence or at least more self-awareness through the second cycle of writing narratives. Edit in Ways that Prepare Third Graders for the ELA Once children have produced two little narrative booklets, revising each a bit, you ll probably want them to select just one of these books to revise and edit more carefully. The editing will probably include an emphasis on checking spelling words with an emphasis on high frequency words. Check also to see whether your children spell polysyllabic words by stretching them out and representing every syllable and sound they hear. If they do this, then you will probably want them to remember that once 12

13 they have voiced a syllable say, tion they will want to think, What other tion words do I know? How can I use that word I know to help me spell this word I don t know? That is, children need to progress from relying on sound alone towards relying on analogy (and on their knowledge of spelling patterns.) Children will then spend a day or two editing their work. You will, of course, look at their drafts and at the quick publish they wrote on the first day of school to get ideas for what to teach. Keep in mind the types of conventions that New York State has decided third graders should be responsible for on the ELA. For the first published piece of September, look for children s use of ending punctuation and capitalization. Do they capitalize names of people, and places, and titles? Start to develop a class chart of conventions that kids should be responsible for in their writing. Once you ve taught capital letters, for instance, this must become an expectation for all of their work notebooks and drafts and published pieces and you can move on to a new goal for the next round of publication. Parallel Work Across the Day You may want to establish a ritual of storytelling, starting perhaps with you, the teacher, telling your true story of one thing you did or with a child doing this who can set the standard. If you create a sense of excitement around this, giving the story teller enough drum roll so that he or she rises to the occasion, you won t regret this! All eyes on Marcus, you might say. Marcus, wait til everyone is with you. Then tell it to give us goose bumps. Once you ve gotten this storytelling off to a powerful start, you might end each school day by inviting Partner A to tell a story to Partner B and then do the opposite the next day. Don t hesitate to coach. The craft moves of telling a story well stretching out the suspenseful parts, using key details, aiming to evoke an emotional response in readers all have corollaries in qualities of good writing. Above all, ask What do you want your readers to feel? and help children aim to tell their stories in ways that effect their listeners. 13

14 October DRAFT Unit 2 Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing (Drawing on the Edge- Of-The-Seat Unit) We linger for two months within one structure of writing (shifting from a focus on narrative to focus on expository writing) because we know that real progress comes not from constantly exposing children to yet another form of writing but from working within any one form in order to help children write longer, more significant, more conventional, and more graceful pieces of writing. It is especially important that children learn to write effective narratives because every other kind of writing they will do relies upon them being skilled at writing narratives. The real goal of this unit, then, is not to improve the quality of narrative writing but to improve the quality of the writing and of the writers in general. You will probably begin this unit by telling children they will be re-visiting narrative writing (don t mask this fact!) and then by helping them understand that they will need to draw on all they already know. This is a perfect opportunity to teach children that writers carry a cumulative repertoire of strategies a tool box of sorts with us, drawing on these as needed. For example, you might say, You already have a whole repertoire of strategies for generating narrative writing, and briefly direct children s attention to a chart listing strategies for generating writing which you know your students learned during the preceding unit. By referring to all that students already know and inviting them to draw upon that full repertoire, you can emphasize that learning to write is cumulative, and that any new work that writers do will always stand on the shoulders of previous work. Children will have already learned that writers sometimes think about a person or a place or a thing that is important to them, jot that person, place or thing down, and then brainstorm small moments we spent with that person, place or thing, so you will certainly remind children that they will want to draw on those strategies again during this unit. But on the other hand, if the stories children wrote in September were sequenced, detailed, and a bit dull, you ll want to tell them that this month, they ll bring more meaning into their writing. You might teach kids other strategies for generating entries in their notebooks, ones that will set them up to write shapely, tension filled stories. For example, it s powerful to suggest children think of a time when they felt a strong feeling hope, worry, sadness. They might also recall a small moment when they tackled a problem and overcame it! As with previous units, the minilesson for the day is not the assignment for the day, so encourage kids to draw from any of the repertoire of strategies that they have come to find successful for them personally. After generating half a dozen entries, children will then choose one as a seed idea and start to develop that seed. It will still be important for children to write in the moment but you may teach them that in fact it is okay to sometimes think about writing two moments that go together to help tell their story. For instance, if I wanted 14

15 to tell the story of the first time I made a goal at a soccer game, I may start my story with a scene at practice when I tried and tried unsuccessfully to make a goal, then a second scene when I score a goal and my team runs and tackles me with excitement. Children can draft in booklets with the pages set up to give them the space and push to elaborate. Teach revision lessons based on what you see. Do students use dialogue effectively? Is the setting clear in each scene on the page? Does the reader really build suspense and tension in the story by stretching out the important parts and building up the tension? Meanwhile, rally children to look really closely at the ways in which writers create powerful, true stories. Encourage children to read texts like those they will write, to let those texts affect them, and then to pause and ask, What has this writer done that has affected me? Help children read touchstone texts as insiders, examining the text closely in order to think also, What has the author done to create this effect? Teach that writers focus their pieces not only by narrowing the time-frame in which they write but also by deciding on the angle from which to tell a story. We teach children to ask, What am I trying to show about myself through this story? What do I want readers to know about me? How can I bring that meaning out in this episode? As part of this, we help children learn that the same story can be told differently, depending on the theme the writer wants to bring out. An episode about falling from the monkey bars could be written to show that the writer was afraid but conquered her fears or to show that peer pressure goaded the writer to take reckless risks. You will want to think about a touchstone text that merits study. The challenge is to make sure that children don t pour over the exact same text one year, then next, the next. Many of the short two-page stories from Highlights magazine can serve as models for personal narratives. These stories are often written in the first person, and have a very concrete story structure that begins with a main problem, builds tension as the problem worsens, and then ends with the resolution to the problem. I also recommend Hesse s Come On, Rain. Once students have drafted, you ll teach them to revise, and especially if you decide to follow this curricular course, you may not devote a separate unit to studying narrative craft within Edge of the Seat Stories. This work, then, will need to be informed by the knowledge of how stories go. Stories have settings; have your students developed theirs? Children may also study effective leads and endings, the use of dialogue, and ways of showing the passage of time. Have they considered that stories usually contain a problem and a solution? If the child then writes about the day he gets a bike, he may want to set this vignette up by telling how, all his life, he longed for a bike. In this way, children can use their knowledge of good narratives to develop their writing. 15

16 Before publishing and celebrating their stories, you will remind the kids of the importance of editing. Pull out that chart from the first unit of study, and remind kids what they should already be doing. Some children will, of course, need more instruction on how to punctuate sentences or where to put capital letters, and these groups of children become your targets for small group editing strategy lesson. For the whole class, move on to a new goal, again keeping in mind the types of conventions that will be assessed in January s ELA test. You may start to make the link between the work that you re doing in Writer s Workshop and short editing try its like those they will have to edit on the ELA. This will help to create automaticity. If you feel as if your students have a good grasp on the kids of basic conventions that will be tested, you may choose to move on to some editing that is aligned with the revision work you taught. For instance, if you taught children to include dialogue, you may teach them to edit for quotation marks. For spelling, your children should be responsible for the correct spelling of the growing list of high-frequency words that you have studied during word study. 16

17 Unit 3 Writing Information Books With Authority and Voice November Before you can progress into a unit on informational writing, you need to decide what exactly you want your class to write. We suggest you channel children towards writing informational texts which contain categories or chunks of information, arranged under sub-headings or topic sentences. If children are making this sort of text in the writing workshop, then this writing work will match the comprehension work they are doing in reading workshop. As they read a variety of non-narrative informational texts, you ll be helping them pay attention to heading, subheadings, and topic sentences, - learning to see how informational texts are organized. You ll teach them to read for the big ideas of these texts, and to notice how details support or illustrate those big ideas. Therefore, students will be writing the same kinds of texts they are reading. Search through your nonfiction texts to find a few which can be regarded as exemplar texts for this informational writing. Choose ones that resemble the texts you hope your children will write in this unit (not because they match the topics that your writers will address, but because they are structurally similar to the texts your children will write). You ll need to decide which features you ll highlight in your minilessons, and make sure the touchstone texts you select illustrate those features. For example, given that you ll probably emphasize the importance of categorizing information, you ll probably want to find model texts which have clear subcategories, with the information pertaining to one sub-topic falling under one heading, and the information pertaining to another sub-topic falling under a second heading. You may decide to look for writers who integrate facts with opinions and ideas. You may also search for exemplar texts that blend clear, straightforward informational writing with voice. If so, you ll look for books that engage the reader and sound as if the author is speaking straight to the reader, with sentences embedded amongst the factual information in which the author relates the factual information to something more personal. If you are teaching both narrative and non-narrative nonfiction reading in your reading workshop, you may choose a touchstone text that contains chapters or sections that sound more story-like (but are still informational). For example, an informational book that deals with the life cycle of a butterfly may contain sections that sound more like a chronological narrative while still incorporating facts. Once you ve chosen an exemplar text or two, you re ready to begin. You ll want to provide a unit overview for your children. This will be easy to do because this unit in the writing workshop parallels the unit on nonfiction reading in the reading workshop. In the reading workshop, your children will be reading texts in which writers become teachers, laying out a course of study for readers. You might, therefore, say: You, too, can write in such a way that you teach other people about the topics on which you are an expert. 17

18 For a day or two, children can use their writers notebooks as places to brainstorm their areas of expertise. For example, you could say, If your baby brother annoys you, think, I could teach a course (or write a book) called, Annoying Little Brothers. Grab your notebook and write that idea down, then spend some time exploring the idea. You d certainly want to teach children that writers try-on ideas by brainstorming subtopics they d include in a particular nonfiction texts. They can also draft titles as a way to consider how focused or general a topic might be. After children collect ideas for possible non-fiction writing topics, they will need to reread their ideas and select one seed idea to develop into a major piece of writing. To do this, you may want to help them learn that nonfiction writers gather information and ideas pertaining to each subtopic that we expect to address. A majority of this information will come from what children already know about a topic. You may also teach the children to gather information from outside sources. This will involve teaching them the skills of note-taking (without expecting mastery). Keep in mind that it is often hard to find books that are on the child s level that pertain to the subject that they already know a lot about take the Annoying Little Brothers idea for instance. If there are no books or articles a child can read on his or her level, in this case, don t give a child a book that is too hard or an article off the Internet simply because it is the only thing on the topic that you can find! Children will end up simply copying facts without comprehending them and their pieces will sound like a regurgitation of someone else s work. Instead, encourage the child to learn by interviewing. You will need to decide how to scaffold this stage of children s writing. Because the information will need to be sorted into categories and sub-categories, you may want the research to be collected in folders, with one folder for each sub-topic. In this case, encourage children to collect notes to be on single sheets of paper, stored in the appropriate folder. Help children to avoid collecting hodgepodges of disparate information stuck together into gigantic blobs. Once children have collected information, ideas, and illustrative anecdotes from their own expertise and from outside sources, they may look back at their tentative categories and reorganize or re-name chapters as they see fit. Children can be taught to write topic sentences or sub-headings for each chapter in their books and for each section in their feature articles. They can also be taught to organize their information according to some logical sequence. A topic sentence might say, There are many players on a soccer team, in which case the sub-section could discuss the jobs of different players and then maybe the relative importance of the positions. A more sophisticated writer, however, might advance an idea in the topic sentence, angling the information that follows to support that focused idea, as in a miniature essay. Such a student might write, The defensive and offensive players on a soccer team have very different jobs. You might decide to help children to elaborate on some facts by adding more detail, or their own voice to facts they got from their research. One method is to teach what we could describe as partner sentences; as in, the first 18

19 sentence tells a fact but then it is partnered with a second sentence that gives more information, e.g. Fish have gills. Gills are the slits on the side of the fish s body that allow it to breathe. Teach them, as well, other ways to elaborate, including relating a new concept to something their reader may know (e.g. Fish breathe through gills. The gills open and close like the blinds on your window. ) One of the challenges when children write informational texts is that they have too much information; you may want to emphasize the importance of knowing your audience, and selecting information they think will be especially interesting or surprising to readers. Children will probably draft each section, or chapter, of their information book by laying out the materials they have collected and deciding upon an order that will make sense to their reader. Because the volume of writing that kids produce in this unit will be greater than in the last, some teachers suggest children piece their information and ideas together with scotch tape, taping in also sections of text in which the writer reflects on the significance of their information. This is also a good time for children to return to touchstone texts to see how authors use illustrations and diagrams as teaching tools. You may also teach children to add other features such as glossaries, indexes, and back-cover blurbs to their finished pieces. Then children do any final revision on this taped-together draft, edit this, and are ready to make just one more draft, which is their final published piece. In teaching editing, teach children that their texts are going to teach important information to their readers and thus they need to be clear and accurate. How can the reader learn about the topic if the writer s words are misspelled? In editing nonfiction books, teach children that the resources from which they got their information are great sources for correcting spelling of content-specific vocabulary. Remind them that the conventions that they paid attention to in their personal narratives are also important in this new genre. In addition, you might also teach children another use of commas that show up a lot in nonfiction off-setting definitions of words that are defined in context. Informational writing also provides a perfect opportunity to remind children about paragraphing. 19

20 December/ Early January DRAFT Unit 4 Writing About Reading and Writing Simple Literary Essays To Prepare for the ELA Exam Writing About Reading If your third graders have grown up in writing workshops, the ELA will not pose especially difficult writing challenges for them. You might, therefore, borrow a bit of the time you normally set aside for a writing workshop and use this time to be sure children are continuing to read just-right books. You could do this within a writingabout-reading unit of study. That is, during this unit of study, teach children that people who want to write about reading first need to read, and to read with our mindson-fire. Suggest children, then, spend part of the writing workshop reading just-right series books, and doing so in ways which allow them to write. This will accomplish a couple of goals. It will allow you to teach children to do the sort of writing-aboutreading children need to do on the ELA, and it will meanwhile give children a chance to continue reading their just-right series books, something which all too often gets jettisoned during this stressful time. You can remind children that they already know a lot about growing ideas as they read. To demonstrate, you could ask them to jot ideas about characters as you read aloud. Pause to say things such as, I notice that Fox seems to always be so annoyed by his little sister. In every book, he is complaining about her! Stop and jot about the ideas you re having about Fox This will prepare children for the short responses of the ELA, where they listen to a story and then answer questions, often questions about a character s behaviors, feelings, and motivations. At the start of the unit, you might put children in partnerships, reading the same books or at least books within the same series. You will give them reminders (not new minilessons) about the kinds of ideas that readers have which make us stop and jot. This will draw heavily on the work you did in October s reading workshop. After reading for fifteen minutes, children can take an idea they jotted down during that time and write more about the idea. This little entry won t necessarily become a literary essay yet. Instead, children will be gathering entries in which they think about their series books. For example, a child might write, Fox is a character who gets annoyed with his sister often or Poppleton teaches us a lot about friendship. You ll want to teach children how to say a bit more about these ideas. you can teach them that it sometimes helps to retell times in the story which support the idea. They can also write about why the idea seems to them to be important. They can raise related questions and think about them. They can also write brief summaries of the parts of the story that go with an idea (e.g. I notice Fox gets annoyed easily with his sister. For example, when he his mother asks him to babysit, he gets angry with his sister. ) They can speculate over why characters do the things they do, based on the story (e.g. Fox is probably angry because he wants to play with his friends and he doesn t want to watch his sister. Other parts of the story show that Fox likes to skateboard 20