My Reflection on Unit 2: Writing as a Stage, a Process and a Trait by Kimberly
In this unit I learnt that there are different stages, process and trait of writing. The four stages of writing are emergent, early, transitional and fluent. The emergent stage is when students are scribbling, tracing, drawing and forming letter -like. In the emergent stage, students are developing fine motor skills, writing within lines, developing speech, explain orally, big book reading, story telling - shared reading, etc. At the early stage, students are writing random letters or string of letters and writing via invented spelling. In the transitional stage, students are horning spelling skills, spelling words correctly, use a variety of strategies to spell more difficult words, writing in more genres and greater control over capitalization and punctuation. At fluent stage, students are doing conventional spelling, greater control over their ideas, organization and critique their own writing and that of others.
The five process of writing are:
1. Pre-writing is generating and exploring ideas. In this process students would brainstorm their ideas, talk out their compositions, do graphic organization and do writing prompts. I believe this process allows students to gather and organize their thoughts and their ideas for writing.
2. Drafting is writing ideas as a coherent whole. In this process students dictate their rough draft and are encourage to write without considering spelling and other mechanical issues. To me this process is allowing students to get their ideas to flow without worrying about spelling and mechanics when writing.
3. Revising is reviewing and refining ideas. This process allows students to participate in writing groups with other students, it also allows focus on compliments and making one or two revisions - adding, remove, move or substitute.
4. Editing is conventions of word choice, grammar, spelling, punctuation. I have learnt that when editing it helps and encourage practice in students with their spelling and mechanics.
5. Publishing is sharing your writing. Students will hand write the final copy, using a word processor and share with a friend to the whole class. As teachers, I believe we should display our students work on the wall to encourage them to write more and if we don't display their work, we should have students make a portfolio to show they progress of how they have improved in their writing.
I have learnt that traits are what the teacher is looking for in writing. The teacher is looking for ideas - the overall message and meaning, organization - the structure of the writing, voice - the student's passion for the topic through loud and clear, word choice - the part of speech writer's use to convey meaning, sentence fluency - the grammar that makes a group of words a sentence by the way the sentence sound to the ear, conventions - making writing correct and understandable, and presentation - how the writing appears. Even through we are looking for different traits in writing for students, we as teachers have to firstly teach these traits to students and do not assume that they already know how to do it and what teachers are looking for. In order for students to be good writers they need to know the 6 + 1 writing traits.
In my group activity in bring out conventions in writing, we did the process on writing but concentrate on editing and corrections. During editing students would put on their imaginary correction/editors hat.
They will have a check list 'Does My Paper Have?' for editing before turning in written work.
R Space between words
R Capital on the first word and I
R Punctuation at the end
R Are all words spell correctly
R My name
R Are there any contractions
We also made up a song 'The Convention Song' (In tune of Hokey Pokey).
You put your periods in,
You pull some spelling out.
And you shake them all about.
You make you paper better,
When you edit it just right.
That's what it's all about.
In addition, we made up something like a chant name 'The Royal Court of Punctuation Marks'
The Earl of Exclamation Marks
The Lord of Apostrophes
The Countess of Question Marks
The Prince of Periods
The Duke of Dashes
The Queen of Quotation Marks
Very informative kimberly! I like the detailed information on the writing process and you have shown a really good understanding of the Unit thus far. However remember that the writing process and the traits in writing are linked, and they compliment each other. I also liked that you included the conventions song, it was fun using it in class as well.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of this blog Kimberly, I have learnt quite a lot about the Stages, Processes and traits of writing. The information was quite informative, I can now see how I as a teacher can use it in the classroom with my students. I liked the fact that you used images to display the stages, processes and traits of writing as this caters for the visual learners. I also liked the fact that when you was discussing the process of writing you mentioned your thoughts about it one time. Continue to keep up the good work as I await to see more blog posts from you!
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