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 * This awesome Wikispace shows four articles related to writing and education have fun reading them! In the middle there is a cool interactive piano that is fun to play The web 2.0 tool and 3 additional resources can be found when you click on the Web 2.0 link on the bottom! It is really interesting so check it all out!! **

__** Composing Processes and Writing Instruction at the Middle/Junior High School Level **__ Shah, DeLayne, //Composing Processes and Writing Instruction at the Middle/Junior High School Level//, 109-116. For the past 10 years, there have been a big concern for literacy in the United States. Especially teaching writing in school. Writing skills have been decreasing since about 1974. It is important for teachers to implement writing into their lessons so that there can be a huge turnaround with these statistics. There is a cognitive process model of writing that in the past decade is starting to shift more towards. The shift is concentrating to focus on the writing process more. It concentrates on "a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of writing." This model describes 3 major parts that engage the writer, planning, translating and reviewing. These three steps will enhance the writer in order to generate ideas, organize them, using an appropriate language that goes along with the paper and reviewing the writing process to make sure it is perfect. So the new shift of the writing process focuses on the writing process. Using the appropriate steps to create a well written paper is critical. Incorporating more writing strategies into lesson plans will help the students get use to writing and in the end, the writing process will improve.

__** An Approach to Integrating Writing Skills into the Social Studies Classroom **__ Zagora, Veronica, Social Education Volume 75, Number 1. An Approach To Integrating Writing Skills into the Social Studies Classroom, 17-21. This teacher integrated writing into the curriculum in order to have her students write better with writing assignments such as DBQ Essays. She found out that it is much easier and better to have her students write on a daily basis with writing strategies and develop as writers rather than giving them big writing papers by itself. An example is how she gave her students a DBQ essay as a isolated writing lesson and the results were not impressive so instead she introduced writing into her lesson plans over a longer time frame and she found that her students writing skills were expressed better and she had more time to focus on their difficulties in writing. The rate of writing increased from about once a week to nearly every day. This increased the students overall literacy as well as essay and writing skills. She said that Norman Unrau is the author of a book that effectively designs lesson plans using content area literacy. The shorter reflective writing pieces are easier to grade which gives teachers less stress and more time to work on their lessons. A few strategies that are present throughout the piece are exit passes, skeletons, short persuasive essays and a voter handbook. Each of these we discussed in class, however, the voter handbook makes students design a handbook for Missouri voters that would include all the essential information that a resident would need to understand the Missouri government (I would change that to New York since I want to teach in New York).

Oh Look a cool Piano Why don't you play it?

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__** Using the Position Paper to Teach Higher-Level Thinking Skills in American History **__ Mitchell, William, Magazine of history volume 7, number 4. //Using Position Paper to Teach Higher-Level Thinking Skills in American History, 5-7//. William Mitchell is stating that too often teachers concentrate on teaching knowledge of the content and expecting that writing skills will automatically follow without help. This is not true, teachers need to add more writing to their lessons and they post a few writing activities for American history that are useful in the classroom. William states, “frequently they (students) cannot distinguish between primary and secondary sources” (Mitchell, page1.). Effective teachers will have students work with primary sources and secondary sources in order to distinguish the difference between them and in order for them to write better themselves. Many good things come from writing assignments such as higher thinking skills, peer interaction and research for multiple resources. Mitchell states the following, “Writing is recognized as one of the most effective means of promoting critical thinking because of the need to manipulate ideas precisely” (Mitchell, page 1). Among all the possible writing options, Mitchell states that opinion papers and document-based papers will promote the understanding of history through primary and secondary sources. These papers can have students analyze other sources to get their own perspective, which is thinking critically. This higher-level thinking is exactly what teachers need to have their students do more of. Mitchell also stresses the need for rough drafts and evaluation of other students writing many times.

__** Self-Regulated Strategy Development for Students with Writing Strategies **__ Mason, Linda, Theory Into Practice Vol.50, Issue1, //Self Regulated Strategy Development for Students with Writing Strategies//, 20-27.

Students with writing difficulties often do not like to write so they tend to spend more focus on lower level skills such as handwriting, spelling and punctuation. They often have difficulty with planning to write, organizing thoughts, self-monitoring and revising and correcting their work. For these students with these problems, they can escalate over time all the way up to employment and teachers need to help with these skills. Fortunately the Self Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) was created for these learning disabled students. This strategy incorporates six recursive stages of instruction which are, develop background knowledge, discuss the strategies, model it, memorize it, support it, and independent practice. Developing Background Knowledge is basically, evaluating the students abilities in writing so that teachers know where to start at. Discuss the strategies means that teachers model what is to be expected in writing. Teachers need to make this part fun however the instructional material is critical. Model it means the teacher presents a rubric type of material so that the students have something to go back to and understand what is expected. Memorize it means that the students should be use to what the teacher is expected. A lot of practice is need in this step so that the students get use to correctly writing. Support it is the stage where the teacher really scaffolds the strategy so that the students end up writing on their own. This is implementing Guided practice and students should be able to write on their own after this step. That leads us to the last step which is independent practice. This is self explanatory, the students take what they have learned from this strategy and write on their own. This strategy is demanding in terms of teacher planning, time, and effort. Although it takes a lot of time and effort, after all teaching in general takes a lot of time and effort so it should be nothing new to teachers, research indicates that this strategy is extremely effective. Each and every stage is needed in order for struggling writers to grasp writing better. There are a few things that should be noted. Students are not to be fed with more advanced writing material until they master the stage before it. That goes hand in hand with UDL and scaffolding strategies. You start low and increase the difficulty as the student gets better. Teachers should also not overemphasize student errors since they are focusing on the writing process. Finally, of coarse teachers need to emphasize reviewing the students writing over and over until it is not needed. In the end, students with writing difficulties should get much better with the writing process if this strategy is used.

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