WHAT?
Our next PD session with Verity was called “Finding the
Significance and Note booking”, Verity previously had given us a notebook and
front loaded us on how to encourage the children to record in notebooks
snippets or seeds from their lives that they ‘could’ use later on in their own
writing if they could not connect to the exemplar/text.
I hadn’t introduced the idea of using notebooks with my
class and had moved this idea to the ‘back burner’ so to speak. Verity explained the purpose of the notebooks
to us and said that she had had to start again and establish the use of
notebooks again in her class. She reiterated that when we read there are 2
responses to text – an emotional response/reaction and an intellectual response
(understanding the choices made by the author). As educators, we want our
children to respond to the text and know what type of response it is.
As the PD progressed, I knew that there were a number of
phrases I wanted to establish in my class. One was ‘seeds’ – Verity spoke with
passion about how the notebook was a place to store ‘seeds’ of inspiration so
that later the children could grow them through their writing to create
sincerity. The other was making connections – encourage the children to find
connections within the text but if they can’t help them find connections in
their own lives and their own sparks of inspiration stored in their notebooks.
I madly scribbled on the notes that accompanied the PD, as I
had been inspired to try to get my children writing and using their notebooks.
So over the weekend, I bought enough notebooks for the whole class and readied
myself for my next writing lesson. I made a real fuss and ‘sold’ the idea of
the notebooks to the class – we spent our writing lesson on choosing stickers,
coverseal and labels to decorate and personalise our notebooks. I also made and
effort to record anything that sparked inspiration in my own notebook.
The next day, I used a powerpoint presentation to show the significance
in a range of poems and text that Verity had given us as well as poems from
Literacy online that were at Level 2 NZC. I played with the text and use
pictures and photographs that I thought would connect to my class. The children
were quick to write their own seeds and I was very encouraging.
SO WHAT?
In Chapter Three of Gail Loane’s “I’ve got something to
say”, she discusses that the students need to be taught how to make meaningful
entries and it is important that we need to consciously demonstrate ‘authorly
behaviour’ and that we should be reaching for our notebooks when any possible occasion arises. She also
mentions that we need to plan to teach strategies for meaningful jottings and
keep encouraging these so that in time, habits will form.
NOW WHAT?
I need to familiarise myself again with this chapter as it make more
sense as I am now trying to establish this skill for my children. I have used
the notebooks to get the children to record information/ seeds about their Dads
to help them write about their dad for Father’s Day.
“We
want our young people to grow up knowing that writing is an important and
deeply satisfying life skill, one that helps them make more sense of themselves
and their world, one that helps them to communicate effectively. Much more than
a skill, writing is the creativity of each child making itself known through
the role of author.” – Gail Loane
References
Loane, G., & Muir, S. A. (2010). I've got something to say: leading young writers to authorship. Aries Publishing Company.
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