My Reflection on Unit 5 & 6: Promoting Writing in the Grades - Approaches and Activities & Designing Writing Assessments and Assignments for the Primary Grades

In promoting writing in the primary grades by focusing on approaches and activities which can be used to transform classroom in the primary grades into safe havens for writing. We as teachers can promote writing among students as a means of self-expression and communication as well as as a source of pleasure and relaxation. Teachers need to teach writing every day and track students writing progress using journals, portfolios, writing pleasure and assessments.

With each genre there is a purpose to teaching writing to students:

The purpose for writing descriptive - children become careful observers and choose precise language when they use description. They take notice of sensory details and learn to make comparisons (metaphors and similes) in order to make their writing more powerful.

The purpose for expository  writing - Children collect and synthesize information for informative writing. This writing is objective and reports are the most common type of informative writing. Children use informational writing to give directions, sequence steps, compare one thing to another, explain causes and effects, or describe problems and solutions.

The purpose for persuasive writing - Persuasion is winning someone to your viewpoint or cause. The three ways people are persuaded are by appeals to logic, moral character and emotion. Children present their position clearly and then support it with examples and evidence. 

The purpose for narrative writing - Children retell familiar stories, develop sequels for stories they have read, write stories called personal narratives about events in their own lives, and create original stories. They include a beginning, middle and end in the narrative they write. In the beginning, they introduce the characters, identify a problem and interest readers in the story. In the middle, the problem becomes worse or additional roadblocks are set up to thwart the main character as he/she attempts to solve the problem. In the end, the problem is resolved.

The purpose for poetry writing - Children create word pictures and play with rhyme and other stylistic devices as they create poems. As children experiment with poetry, they learn that poetic language is vivid and powerful but concise and they learn that poems can be arranged in different ways on a page.

Not only we are suppose to teach the genres of writing but we are to create an environment that helps children learn to write. Preparing the classroom environment with materials to support writing like writer's notebook for recording special language heard or read that they may want to use in their writing or ideas thought of when they are nit writing, tools for revising writing (for example paper, highlighters,etc), materials for bookmaking (for example posters, coloured papers, construction paper, etc), reference material (for example dictionaries, spelling book, etc), teacher-made charts to guide their writing efforts and rubrics. 

Teachers are to encourage writing activities among children which include displaying students' writing, hosting reading sessions (students read their writing to an audience) and publishing students' writing (in class).