The Coach's Corner
March's reading and writing thoughts, tips, and take-aways
My Days are Full, My Life is Full by Gail Boushey
article excerpt : January 29, 2016 Issue #393
Make the change
Gail continues by adding, "Maybe we need to change the word busy to full. Perhaps it is actually a privilege to be able to fill our days with the activities we deem most important."
She goes on by adding that when we do this, we move from the negative to the positive. I know that I am so blessed to be able to fill my days with the things, and people, I love. At times it seems too hectic. Now, I am not saying that all of my "busy-ness" is productive all of the time, but changing my perception from "busy" to "full" adds a certain strength to my days. I just need to remember to keep my days filled with the things most important to me, and avoid things that simply make me busy.
Like Gail says, "Let’s celebrate and cherish the fullness of our days."
Reading, Writing, and Reminders
Falling in Love With Words
Voracious readers devour the books they read! Often times, our voracious readers also have extensive vocabularies. What a fantastic way to get to know more words...READ!
For a shared-reading or a read aloud, choose books, or other texts, with strong, vivid vocabulary. Along with the class, create a WOW! Word Wall or anchor chart. Add the WOW! words from the read aloud to the chart, and then send the students out to find WOW! words in their independent reading books. Encourage them to use sticky notes to add their words to the chart, and share them out at the end of the reading session.
Here are several mentor texts excellent for expanding vocabulary by studying word choice: The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County, Night of the Gargoyles, Come On, Rain!, The Wolf Who Cried Boy, The Great Fuzz Frenzy, In the Small, Small Pond, Owl Moon, and The Quiet Book.
The Daily Cafe has an excellent expanding vocabulary reference guide on their site. Check it out, or let me know if you would like it.
Create Wonderful, WOW! Word-Collectors in your classrooms today; voracious reading "volumizes" vocabulary.
The Reading-Writing Connection
“Don’t write merely to be understood. Write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Continuing with the vocabulary theme, I am reminded of an article I read about the impact of vocabulary development on writing. Here is an excerpt from the article,
Vocabulary in your students’ writing: the Bottom Line written by Cheryl Boyd Zimmerman:
Isn’t it obvious? In order to write well, we need to know a lot of words, and we need to know a lot about each word so we can use it to say what we mean. In fact, without the knowledge of many words, our writing is stymied – or should I say crimped? impeded? blocked? snookered? A word choice transmits not only meaning, but tone and subtleties of meaning such as familiarity or distance, precision or vagueness, certainty or ambiguity, earnestness or light-heartedness and more. For academic writing, this becomes especially challenging. In order to communicate as I intend, I need to know the ways in which words vary and then I need a wide variety of words from which to make my choices.
Why isn’t vocabulary development included in every writing class? Perhaps we underestimate the difficulty of this task and prefer to spend precious classroom time on other issues. Or perhaps we don’t know how to integrate word learning into writing in a way that is relevant to the writing task. But by not spending time developing our students’ vocabulary, we are hindering their writing development and academic success.
Some of the take-aways from the article are in the form of research-based bottom lines for students. Here are her bottom lines:
- Different types of writing use different types of words. Even very academic papers don’t use a large number of academic words, but they use them effectively. Academic texts contain an average of 10% academic words (Coxhead, 2006).
- Word learning doesn’t just mean to learn new words, but also to learn to have confidence to use words that you recognize but don’t use often. Writing gives you a chance to use partially-known words and to build your knowledge of these words.
- You may have been taught to focus on grammar when you edit your paper, but grammar and vocabulary often overlap. Take time to focus on individual words; do they say what you mean and say it accurately?
Please do not be confused; this is not separate from John Collins. It is part of the writing instruction that goes into the writing process of John Collins. Again, voracious reading within our classrooms, and explicit vocabulary teaching through that reading, will "volumize" student vocabulary in reading, speaking, AND writing.
Reminders
- With Spring MAP around the corner, be sure to look at the resources you were given to help guide instruction. If you are interested in meeting to discuss how to strengthen your RIT band instruction please let me know.
- It is not too late to join the Fountas & Pinnell PLC on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. The March topics are the word study, guided reading, writing, and writing about reading sections of the Continuum of Literacy Learning. Just let me know if you want to join us. All are welcome! We meet March 9 and 23.
- Keep working on writing with John Collins. Henry Dembowski is set to visit us in May.