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