Jared Weisberg
November 3rd, 2014
Donald Graves did an outstanding job with informing us how important writing is in the classroom and what we need to do as future teachers to get the best out of each and every student in writing. In Chapter 4, "Day One: Help Children To Write and Keep Writing" we acknowledge and observe that their are three main elements when dealing with writing in the classroom. Those elements are discovering topic, conducting writing conferences, and sharing your writing. When students are discovering a topic to write about they are putting passion and personal interest into their writing since they get to choose what they want to write about. As a result, you will observe students writing more and putting passion into their work. Then we conduct conferences with our fellow peers if they are of proper age or we conduct conferences with the teacher. During these conferences teachers will be able to observe were their students stand and what they need to work on and improve. Lastly, we share our work with the entire class or other classrooms so we can allow a different set of eyes to view the work. Doing this will not only give the reader more ideas about his or her writing but it also allows the reader to give suggestions and tips for the writer. As one can see, students are getting the most out of their writing by following these three simple elements. I personally believe that these three elements are a fantastic way to introduce writing into the classroom since I have experienced first hand in my past Elementary classrooms.
Chapter 7, "Conditions For Effective Writing" was very intriguing and helpful to me because it explains the importance of writing everyday and what your going to get out of your students by doing that. For instance, this chapter emphasized how you should always dedicate a sufficient amount of time per day for writing. By doing so, your allowing yourself to stress the importance of writing to students but to also make time for Mini-lessons, conferences, demonstration, and self-evaluation. I can vividly remember never writing everyday during my past experiences but after reading this article, I wish my teachers did allow us 45 minutes per day to write. I feel that if my past teachers followed this same method, I would have been a more developed writer a young age since I had so much practice and experience on my hand. However, luckily this chapter stresses the importance of writing everyday and how much you can gain from it. Now I understand how I want to conduct my future classroom when it comes to writing because this chapter showed me how much one can learn from writing each and everyday.
