The One About The Magnifying Lens

Hi, friend! I’m so glad that you’re here. It was been a crazy, beautiful week filled with friends and celebrations as well as some wonderfully warm weather here in the High Country! For this week’s reading, we were encouraged to learn about the process of writing with a magnifying lens. At first, this seemed so logical to me, but after examining Dorfman and Cappelli’s chapter more in depth, I came to realize that this particular skill is one that I, as an advanced writer, take for granted. In Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Literature, K-6, Dorfman and Cappelli acknowledge that “Young writers struggle to create a movie in their readers’ minds” despite the particular mode of writing that they might be using (2017, p.78). In this way, they are referring again to the “bed to bed” method of writing that so many teachers are familiar with. I, myself, struggled with this form of writing as a tutor in the reading clinic here at Appalachian this past summer. During our daily lessons, one of the students that I was working with seemed to be set on providing me with details about her stories that often appeared more like an agenda than anything else. This left me with the question, “How do I help her move past this and encourage her to dig deep to write a story that is more engaging for readers?” What I learned this week is how we, as teachers, can encourage our students to zoom in with a magnifying lens to certain areas of their story in order to add details that make their writing more interesting for readers.

What makes a good narrative piece of writing? What are some real life examples of narrative writing you LOVE? What are the most important things for children to know/learn about strong narratives?

I have always been a loyal reader of Nicholas Sparks. Now, please hear me loud and clear, I am a loyal reader, but I would not consider myself a fan. The reason for this, I have come to discover, is fairly simple: I find that his writing inspires me, but his stories do not. Literally, the way that he describes the people, places, and events in his books simply captivates me- even if I know that the situation is unrealistic and the location HEAVILY embellished. Granted, I would NEVER (repeat NEVER for emphasis) share Sparks’ work with students in my classroom, but I, as a writer, can easily take inspiration from the way that he describes things and use it in my own classroom models for my young writers. For me, a good piece of narrative writing doesn’t just create a scene in a reader’s head. Rather, a good piece of narrative writing makes a reader feel as if they are living in the scene. In their book, Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Literature, K-6, Dorfman and Cappelli encourage writers to invite their readers into the story by utilizing dialogue, appealing to the senses, using anecdotes, and so much more (2017, pp. 80-93). It is by combining all of these elements that students are able to create strong narrative writing pieces.

To help students get started with using one particular strategy on their own, I would conduct a guided lesson using the following page of my own Writer’s Notebook as an example. The table for this lesson can be found on page 85 of Dorfman and Cappelli’s Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Literature, K-6 (2017).

What can you and your students learn about strong narrative writing from the book Shortcut? What strategies does the author use to create an engaging story (illustrations and text)? Identify specific strategies/approaches you could teach children using this mentor text.

Confession: As a pre-service teacher, I happily except things that are offered to me for my future classroom. Old books, manipulatives, and materials fill a whole corner of my basement back home, and I’m not the littlest bit sorry about it because it means that I, at the very least, have something to fill my classroom with next year. Over Christmas, I spent a week sorting, labeling, and leveling the boxes of books that I have either purchased, collected, or been gifted over the past five years. It was maybe the most tedious project I’ve ever taken on, but I’ll tell you, it was worth it because it got me to dive into those boxes and really look at the books that I was considering putting on my classroom shelves for my students to read. Among those books was an old, beat-up (I should say “well-loved”) copy of Shortcut but Donald Crews that had originally belonged to none other than one of my old elementary school teachers! I flipped through the book, acknowledged the simple, yet captivating illustrations, and went on my way. I didn’t know when I would use this book exactly, but it seemed to be the sort that finds its place in your curriculum once you both get settled.

Fortunately for me, the right “place” for this book arrived sooner than expected as a reading for this week’s class. The story is simple as Crews shares the adventures of a group of friends who take a shortcut home that leads them face to face with a train. Shortcut provides readers with an exemplary model of how narrative writing can be used to effectively add details to a story. Crews specifically uses a unique font when writing dialogue for his characters and includes onomatopoeia as part of his illustrations to engage readers. As teachers, we could use Shortcut as a mentor text to teach a variety of skills and writing strategies from Dorfman and Cappelli’s Mentor Texts including “Building Content with Dialogue” (2017, pp. 106-107) and “Moving from Here to There” (2017, pp. 88-90).

Check out excerpted pages from Shortcut that demonstrate the content I discussed below.

A few thoughts about NCTE’s position statement on writing.

On the whole, I find NCTE’s position statement about writing to be logical and informative for teachers. It provides clear expectations about the guiding principles that teachers are expected to teach and students are expected to understand in relation to writing. With that in mind, I want to highlight one area of the position statement that I find particularly important.

In part two, NCTE makes that claim that writers should have the ability to serve as researchers who have developed their own ability to critically analyze and evaluate their own work. My immediate response to reading this was an enthusiastic, “Yes!” because I obviously want to encourage independence and responsibility for learning in my classroom. But this reaction was quickly followed by a far more humbled scratch on the head. Sure, I want students to critically analyze their work, but how do I facilitate this? How does one actually teach elementary age children to think critically about their own work? The answer to this came in a variety of brainstorms both through my own experiences as a graduate student last semester and social media.

As a graduate student, we completed a series of gallery walks during various in-class activities that led me to investigate this a potential reflective writing activity for my future students. In my ideal world, these gallery walks would be structured more as read around groups that enable students to anonymously present their writing for revisions and reflections from peers while also exposing them a plethora of writing ideas from their classmates at the same time. I would structure this activity by having students respond to one another’s writing pieces for a given amount of time using a compliments and suggestions format. While reading, students should be on the lookout for one thing that they loved about the piece and one suggestion that they think would help the reader to improve the story. By providing this 1:1 format for the activity, I believe that we will be able to equally celebrate our areas of success and improvement while acknowledging each of ourselves as skilled writers. You can use the links provided to learn more about gallery walks and read around groups from Jenna at Musings from the Middle School.

Finally, I believe that it is so important for learners to set goals in order to track their progress and improvements throughout the school year. While this will inevitably look different for teachers across grade levels and even classrooms, no one has given me better ideas about this that Ashley Marquez at Teach, Create, Motivate. On Instagram, she describes the way that she uses the square pockets from the Target Dollar Spot to display students’ individual goals on their desks for frequent daily reminders. She allows students to select their goals independently (with her guidance as needed) and regularly meets with students to evaluate their progress. While these goals will at times be specific to writing, they can also be about other subject areas or general classroom procedures such as transition periods and pull-outs. Personally, in my own classroom, I plan to pre-cut papers to fit in the pockets and have students write their own goals on these sheets. Then, we will use special stickers, stamps, or a whole punch to track how often they are effectively meeting this goal. By doing this, both my students and I will be provided with visual reminders and incentives about their goal progress.

Well, that’s all I have for this week! I hope that at least some of my words have left you inspired to consider using “writing through a magnifying lens” as a tool in your classroom. I can’t wait to catch up with you again next week!

For more information about the resources listed above check out:

Dorfman, L.R. & Cappelli, R. (2017). Mentor texts: Teaching writing through children’s literature, K-6. (2nd ed). United States: Stenhouse Publishers.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2016). Professional knowledge for the teaching of writing. Retrieved from http://www2.ncte.org/statement/teaching-writing/.