The one comforting thing that Regie Routman would find in my MT’s classroom is her 1988 edition Writing Essentials book. My MT is actually very interested in her writing suggestions for teachers. She told me that Routman was the one who inspired her new vision of how to teach writing. She changed her traditional way of mainly focusing on the writing procedures and processes (parts of writing). I feel very grateful that she has shown me how to teach the first graders to write. More important, I have been the one leading this very fun writing activity. It starts from one daily interview with the classroom helper of the day. While the first grader gets interviewed by the class, the teacher serves mainly as a recorder of his/her story. After the whole class’ reading of the finished story, each student draws a picture of the interviewer and writes something about him/her. I am pretty confident that my current writing activity would put a big smile on Routman’s face since she‘s the one who advocates for students’ fun, authentic, and daily writing practice. For her, the first important step is to have engaging writing topics for students. My MT’s writing topic is very interesting for the whole class. Imagine that Jimmy is one of the first graders just starting a new school year, what an exciting day it would be for him to be at the center of attention! It is also fun for the other students because they get opportunities to ask questions and get to know one classmate more. The rest of them also look forward to their “big day.” I’ve been enjoying reading their stories hanging on the wall and getting to know one more student better. I also draw and write the same time with the class to give further writing modeling. As Routman also thinks that it is very important that teachers need to give adequate modeling. When I show off my picture story to the class, I always get many big smiles from them. Each student works hard at their places knowing that there are real readers waiting for their picture stories. This gives another reason for Routman to be happy with this writing activity since she stresses the importance of having real audiences for students’ writings. There is also another writing activity during one of the centers. The first graders use their newly acquired words completing sentences. It has a sentence template like this “I see a green _______ .” The kids really liked doing that since they could put their choice nouns there. They not only learn the nouns, but also get used to writing with words they know. There is also another brief writing activity during the Reading Street instruction. The students could draw a thing and finish the sentence frame “I sit in a ______ .” The above two activities all seem to be fun and engaging. Routman will definitely smile in my classroom, but she will probably get puzzled about the writing problem in my classroom. She calls for at least 45 minutes of writing daily. My class does daily writing but only meets less than half of Routman’s time expectations. How can my MT and I arrange more writing time for the students? Neither of us could figure out a way to do that. I could at most think about the possibility of adding a diary to the class drawing and writing about something that interest to them. It would be good that the class could do a group share with what they write down. The other thing lacking in my class is the revision part of students’ writings. All these writing instruction problems stem from the same one problem - there is simply not enough time during the day. Due to the time conflict, I thought that it might be a good idea to integrate writing with other subjects such as math, science, and social studies. Maybe, the students could try to write down math problems in letter/word clusters, or sentences. They could also record science observations such as weather types. They could draw and write about rules of the classroom. But how do I do that? I just have to wait and see.

Writing Instruction

Most teachers work across their careers to improve their writing instruction. If Regie Routman visited your classroom during a typical week, what advice would she have for you about what you can (agency) do (action) to improve writing instruction? Be specific about whether she might suggest targeting how to integrate basic skills more efficiently, or organize for daily writing, or ways to talk with students about their writing, etc. Why would she suggest focusing on that target area?

The very first thing I think Regie Routman would say is that we don't have enough writing instruction going on in our classroom. We have not had a writing workshop every day of school. Sometimes we just don't get to it, so in her words, she would say that we don't value writing instruction enough (page 176). Every time we do have a writing session, though, we do model it on the Smart Board while the students sit on the rug, so they are paying attention. We model how we sound out the words and write them down. A rule for when the students are writing is that if they make a mistake or want to erase something, they are not allowed to. The have to just cross it out and go down to the next line. So, while we are modeling our writing, we make sure to do that as well, to remind them. Part of me thinks that Regie would think that is good, but part of me thinks that she might think that we are focusing too much on their revising of the piece while they are writing.

We definitely stress to the students to just do their best and not to worry about whether they are spelling things correct or not. And we will not tell students how to spell words. I have noticed myself and my MT saying, "add more detail", "tell me more" etc. But, after reading these chapter I now know that we should be saying things more like, "tell me what happened next". Also, before giving suggestions we need to give the students a compliment and make sure they understand that they are doing well so that they don't get discouraged.

Another thing that I think Regie Routman would discuss with us would be topic. I feel that we are sort of in the middle of the road with regards to choosing topics. We give the students a very broad topic and they can write about anything within that topic that they would like. Examples of topics we have chosen are, "My favorite thing is...", "I like to...", "I can...". Now that I am looking at these three topics, I realize that they are very similar. The students might consider writing about the same thing each time (which one child did want to do). But we have another rule...students are not allowed to write about something they have already written about. I understand why my teacher does this, but from the readings, I now believe that we are severely hindering our students ability to just write. The one child who wanted to write about her cat multiple times got very frustrated and said she didn't want to write about anything if she couldn't write about her cat. In this way, I do feel that we are not producing good, independent writers. What do you think?

Overall, I do feel that my MT does more in regards to writing instruction that many other teachers I have seen, but there is definitely room for improvement and I would be interested to see if the students would be able to conference among themselves or as a whole class instead of having continual informal conferences after every writing with us.

Would Regie think that there is enough writing instruction going on in your classrooms? Why or why not? After reading the chapters and my blogs, do you have any suggestions about adapting our writing instruction at least a little bit? How might you adapt yours?