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First Grade Writers: Units of Study to Help Children Plan, Organize, and Structure Their Ideas
What readers will love about this book is that it offers big-picture understandings of teaching, then it zooms in and offers the details of that teaching.
Katie Wood Ray, author of About the Authors First graders have no shortage of ideas. The hard part for them is putting thoughts together into a cohesive draft. Organizing and planning for writing defy simple description and aren't easily modeled for students, making them challenging topics to convey to young children. Where do you find the language and tactics to teach these subtle processes? With First Grade Writers , Stephanie Parsons will change how you think about teaching the thinking behind writing. Parsons outlines five specific units of study for your writing workshop that help students prepare thoughtfully to write. Beginning with a September unit specially designed to introduce the writing workshop to first graders and build a classroom community that supports risk taking and learning, each successive unit builds upon the previous one and fosters independence. By June your students will know how to plan for writing out loud and on paper, leading to elegant, well-structured pieces. The units also help children to differentiate the planning and organization needed to Best of all, First Grade Writers is corner-of-the-desk practical with concise, logically laid-out descriptions of how each unit of study operates, a variety of helpful tables, charts, and assessment diagnostics, as well as elaborations, teaching points for minilessons and conferences, troubleshooting tips, and month-by-month planning assistance. If you're new to first grade, Stephanie Parsons will give you ideas for top-notch teaching that will be invaluable as you establish your first writing workshop. If you're a veteran, the units in First Grade Writers will augment your existing workshop and help your students clearly conceptualize what high-quality writing looks like. Either way, you'll help them write better by thinking about the thinking behind good writing.
Katie Wood Ray, author of About the Authors First graders have no shortage of ideas. The hard part for them is putting thoughts together into a cohesive draft. Organizing and planning for writing defy simple description and aren't easily modeled for students, making them challenging topics to convey to young children. Where do you find the language and tactics to teach these subtle processes? With First Grade Writers , Stephanie Parsons will change how you think about teaching the thinking behind writing. Parsons outlines five specific units of study for your writing workshop that help students prepare thoughtfully to write. Beginning with a September unit specially designed to introduce the writing workshop to first graders and build a classroom community that supports risk taking and learning, each successive unit builds upon the previous one and fosters independence. By June your students will know how to plan for writing out loud and on paper, leading to elegant, well-structured pieces. The units also help children to differentiate the planning and organization needed to Best of all, First Grade Writers is corner-of-the-desk practical with concise, logically laid-out descriptions of how each unit of study operates, a variety of helpful tables, charts, and assessment diagnostics, as well as elaborations, teaching points for minilessons and conferences, troubleshooting tips, and month-by-month planning assistance. If you're new to first grade, Stephanie Parsons will give you ideas for top-notch teaching that will be invaluable as you establish your first writing workshop. If you're a veteran, the units in First Grade Writers will augment your existing workshop and help your students clearly conceptualize what high-quality writing looks like. Either way, you'll help them write better by thinking about the thinking behind good writing.
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 30, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 25, 2020
This is the sort of book that ought to give someone pause when reading it. A great deal of elementary education involves flattery of young students. This is unsurprising. Early elementary schoolers (as this book is written about) are generally new to reading and writing and in order to encourage them to engage in such tasks, a certain amount of flattery is to be expected. If the teacher goes further along this process than I would prefer, it is because she tends to express a dislike of testing and encouraging a factual knowledge of something and is far more interested in encouraging their children to find their own meaning in texts. Now, this whole aspect of finding one's own meaning is something that has run rampant in contemporary society with extremely damaging results, and the author appears to be gung ho about supporting this tendency, which suggests that there are some substantial disagreements about the importance of education and the role of external reality in shaping our own mindset. The author, it would seem, is not one of those who places a high value on objective truth, and that limits my own appreciation of her approach.
This book is a short one at just a bit more than 150 page and it is divided into seven chapters that are temporally organized in order throughout the school year. The book begins with a foreword by Kathy Collins and the usual acknowledgments. After that the author introduces the subject of reading and how it can be celebrated and encouraged for young learners. After that the author encourages teachers to turn their students into a community of readers through a great deal of subtle manipulation and flattery (1). The author then moves to helping encourage teachers to show students how to make sense of letters (2) and to use the developing skills in reading to bring books to life (3). After that there is a discussion on encouraging young readers to read with a wide-awake mind (4) with the purpose of learning (5). Discussions on speaking and acting out what is read encourage young people to sound like readers (6) when talking about books and then encourage the teacher to plan for independence and summer reading (7), after which there are appendices with handouts (i) and websites to help foster the habit of reading (ii).
By and large, there are some things that even a wary and suspicious reader like myself can take from this book and appreciate. Certainly as a prolific reader I am appreciative of those who encouraged me to read and learn and to become the sort of independent-minded person I am when it comes to thinking--something not everyone appreciates. Even so, it is hard to know what aspects of this book spring from a genuine love of seeing people read and learn and grow and what parts spring from a desire to encourage a certain sort of person who values their own subjective opinion and thinking more than objective reality as it can be recognized and understood by others. Ideally, we should be aware of both our internal subjective reality and cultivate our creativity and our God-given talents as well as be aware of the external state of the world outside of us that exerts its pull on us, however much we may dislike it. Yet it seems all too easy to either grade according to objective facts that are easy to regurgitate but that do not blossom into deeper love or passion or to encourage individual interpretations that are fanciful and not particularly on point as a way of flattering others into thinking they are more insightful than they actually are. This book is clearly in the latter camp.
This book is a short one at just a bit more than 150 page and it is divided into seven chapters that are temporally organized in order throughout the school year. The book begins with a foreword by Kathy Collins and the usual acknowledgments. After that the author introduces the subject of reading and how it can be celebrated and encouraged for young learners. After that the author encourages teachers to turn their students into a community of readers through a great deal of subtle manipulation and flattery (1). The author then moves to helping encourage teachers to show students how to make sense of letters (2) and to use the developing skills in reading to bring books to life (3). After that there is a discussion on encouraging young readers to read with a wide-awake mind (4) with the purpose of learning (5). Discussions on speaking and acting out what is read encourage young people to sound like readers (6) when talking about books and then encourage the teacher to plan for independence and summer reading (7), after which there are appendices with handouts (i) and websites to help foster the habit of reading (ii).
By and large, there are some things that even a wary and suspicious reader like myself can take from this book and appreciate. Certainly as a prolific reader I am appreciative of those who encouraged me to read and learn and to become the sort of independent-minded person I am when it comes to thinking--something not everyone appreciates. Even so, it is hard to know what aspects of this book spring from a genuine love of seeing people read and learn and grow and what parts spring from a desire to encourage a certain sort of person who values their own subjective opinion and thinking more than objective reality as it can be recognized and understood by others. Ideally, we should be aware of both our internal subjective reality and cultivate our creativity and our God-given talents as well as be aware of the external state of the world outside of us that exerts its pull on us, however much we may dislike it. Yet it seems all too easy to either grade according to objective facts that are easy to regurgitate but that do not blossom into deeper love or passion or to encourage individual interpretations that are fanciful and not particularly on point as a way of flattering others into thinking they are more insightful than they actually are. This book is clearly in the latter camp.
July 24, 2011
As a jumping-off point, Parsons lets us in on her crystal-clear thinking about where first graders are developmentally in their reading and where they need to go. Then, she outlines in great detail a proposed course of study for turning your early elementary students into a community of readers. I really think that parts of this book can be adapted to meet kindergarten needs, as well -- just with different focus and pacing. And that's what I love most about this author -- she engages teachers as thinkers and seems to expect that we will go beyond the pages of this text in order to design curriculum.
December 20, 2011
This book was a tremendous help in imagining instructional possibilities that would work for first and second-graders at a school without writing workshop. What to teach them? How to structure it? This slim book helps.
September 10, 2007
Another greate resource for first grade teacher. This has great mini-lesson ideas for writer's workshop.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews