Nikki Meyer

Emergent Literacy
Professor McKool

Talking, Drawing, Writing: Lessons For Our Youngest Writers

Chapter 6-
The purpose of this chapter was for teachers to understand the importance of
assessing their student’s work. Every time teachers talk and reflect with students
individually, it gives the teacher a better understanding of their thinking process. It is
also important to observe students writing and record what we see which can be
uncomfortable for some teachers because that’s a new development in the education
system. Also, when we as teachers observe the notes and reflections we’ve taken on a
student, we as teachers become more comfortable studying our students work on our
own.
Teachers can record their student’s progress by using a chart system, in the left
hand column of the chart, the teacher records the date in which they looked at the
student’s work. In the next column titled, “Knows About Craft”, the teacher will list the
things that the students have showed that they know how too. In the column, “Knows
About Conventions”, the teacher will write what the students know about writing, for
instance, spacing, punctuation, vocabulary, capitalization, and letter formation. In the
next column, “Needs To Learn”, the educator will generate the lessons they will teach to
help the students advance academically. This type of assessment can be done for small
groups or the whole class

Chapter 7-
This chapter discuses the importance of booklets, and by booklets, they mean
pages of copied papers with a color cover. These booklets are effective because it’s
familiar to the students, they invite playfulness, it has a built in expectation that you have
a lot to say on a topic, it offers a logical structure for teaching elements of craft, it makes
revision easy, and it lends itself to writing sentences and paragraphs. There’s three
different ways to introduce a booklet, by introducing them to a whole class, to individual
children and finally by introducing them using our own writing.
Introduce the booklet to the whole class gradually and by addressing the students
as a class using individuals for examples, when introducing the booklet to an individual
student, the teacher goes through the booklet’s pages helping individual students who are
overwhelmed with energy to get started and helps guide them in a specific direction. Or
the teacher makes an uneasy student feel more comfortable by lessening the amount of
booklet pages for the student. In order to introduce a booklet using our own writing as an
example, teachers should start off by telling a story and the begin drawing in an enlarged
booklet as they read aloud. This way, the students are able to hear our ideas, see our
planning process and see how we get started so they can follow our model.

Chapter 8-
Once students have begun working in their booklets, they need guidance and
information that will help push them forward as writers. It is important to observe
students writing to make sure that their stories make sense, to see if they are writing
about what’s important, they’re writing about time and place and being specific with their
stories. It is also important for students to be revising their work, using topics for
guidance, proofreading, creating a beginning, middle and end and well as making their
characters come alive and attending to the mechanics of writing.
When teachers perform mini lessons and interactive read aloud, it helps students make
sense of other stories so they can make sense of their own. It is also important to help
students focus on an important event in their stories so they can fill that section of their
story with a rich vocabulary and specific details. Teachers should be animated and
enthusiastic while revising a students work so they realize that revision is helpful and fun
because they get to make decisions about their writing, having student pick topics that are
interesting to them also guarantee success in a student writing because they’ll pick a topic
they know about. Proofreading is extremely important because it gives students a sense
of responsibility to make sure that their writing is ready for others to read and observe.

Chapter 9-
As students engage in their booklets with reading, writing and drawing, the
teacher can now create mini lesson that focus more on the craft of writing. It great to see
students writing detailed narratives, but its important for teacher’s to help students
understand the most important parts of the narratives and focus only on the important
parts. The important parts of the story should be important to the author, events that
affected them in a negative or positive way; those are the events that should be focused
on in detail. It’s important for the teacher to revisit the topic days in a row so students
understand what’s important and what should be specific.
In order to understand this concept, the teacher should use an abundant amount of
example to ensure that every student grasps the point of the lesson. Teachers can do an
interactive read aloud, stopping at certain points in the story to demonstrate the language
the author used to convey the importance of the story. The teacher should do this
multiple times using the same language and similar examples so that the students
understand the lesson. Teachers should also point to pictures and make connections to
the story they are reading so the students have visual and verbal examples of what the
teacher expects them to do with the stories.