Quote(s) of the Week:

“This unit is a journey, and at every bend in the road you have extraordinary lessons to teach. The most important learning and teaching will happen as you and your students grapple with the complexities, and challenges of thinking and writing logically.” (Lucy Calkins, Breathing Life Into Essays p. 149)

Lessons:

Teachers worked on sessions 13-16 this week. Across grades 3-5 we had students writing supporting stories, angling their work, drafting the stories into supporting paragraphs, and working on introductions and conclusions.

Reflection:

This is by far my favorite unit to teach in the LC series. (Poetry in the K-2 series is my other favorite.) I spent some time this week listening to my colleagues talk about their kids and the work that was taking place. Over and over I heard the concern that the students weren’t “getting it” and I remembered feeling the same way. I was reminded today what it was that changed things for me: One day, a tenth grade teacher stopped by my room to ask me about the thesis topics I had posted. He was heading to his wife’s classroom and spotted a display I had made to simply show the different thesis topics my kids had committed to. He was amazed (and impressed, excited, and thankful) that we were beginning to teach students how to structure their thinking and their writing in the primary grades. He asked me if I had always taught essays in grade 3 and I told him no, this was my first attempt. His response to the work encouraged me to look at my students’ writing not as an END, but as a beginning. I was starting something. I was laying the foundation and that work would make a difference in their writing lives in middle and high school.

Hints/Tips:

Remember: Writing is thinking. We are developing our students’ capacities to think about what they are doing just as much as we are teaching them how to structure a 5-paragraph essay. The quote above beautifully illustrates the emphasis and approach I believe we should be taking with this unit, especially on our first go of it. As we move away from the final product being the most important focus, and instead work on creating writers (and by that I mean thinkers…organizers…powerful communicators) we notice that children are learning how to do this work. They aren’t there yet. We aren’t there yet. However, they are taking the necessary step toward seeing writing as a powerful, necessary form of communication worth thinking about.

This week a colleague was describing how one of her students had a thesis that wasn’t working out as well as she had hoped. The good news is that the student realized the problem was with his thesis choice. It wasn’t something he really cared about or new extensively. Sure he is writing the essay, but it isn’t as powerful as both he and the teacher had hoped or expected. Trouble is, at this point in the unit it is too late for the student to start work on a new thesis. My advice? Celebrate the learning. Imagine if this student internalizes some of the strategies, which will lead him to better select, or better organize his essays in the future. What if he never forgets this first essay in Mrs. So-and-Sos 4th grade class and it changes the way he writes forever? Isn’t that the mark of good teaching? Celebrate it. Get him to articulate it. And praise him for learning it.

Fitting it all in…
We are battling to get this unit in and done. I realize teachers feel like we are pushing through this and it seems impossible. The pace is quick. However, at this point in our implementation and in our spiral development, we need to teach these units to know what we need to keep, add, and emphasize. The first year I taught this series I got bogged down in Unit 2, teaching and reteaching until everyone was there, on the same page, at the same spot. Four weeks of work and I was only 1/2 through the unit. I was burnt out and the students were heading toward frustration. Today, I understand that these units are to be taught each in about a month. For us that is roughly 20 days. The pace is quick. However, as Lucy says over and over, the minilessons mostly aren’t meant to be lessons every student works on that very day. Standing back from the unit, and getting the big picture forces you to make a plan to start and end. The pace is quick. Stay focused.

Consider your final product when you are thinking about time. There have been times when I taught this unit when I used a cut-and-paste method to put the final product together. Once students selected their mini-stories, (which I considered the most important part) I had them glue the stories on long sheets of paper in the correct order with the introduction and conclusion framing the work. Although this product looked exactly as it sounds… cut out and pasted together, it was a visual example of the thinking behind the placement and organization of text. That visual piece gave parents an opportunity to see the steps in this process and to celebrate them with their child.