View a Sample Chapter - National Council of Teachers of English

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The driving force behind children’s curiosities and inquiries in the curriculumwas familiar to us from Dewey (1938), who advocates for the child as anactive constructor of his or her own knowledge through experience. We hadread Katz and Chard’s (2000) work on the project approach and had experiencedthe curricular power of children’s projects in our own classrooms. Our literacyeducation background included Short and Harste’s (1996) Creating Classroomsfor Authors and Inquirers in which the notion of inquiry is applied and integratedwith the work of learning to read and write. Our conversations included thinkingabout literacy as a project itself, an intense, self-motivated investigation oflearning to read and write.RelationshipsFinally, our Reggio influences led us to allow ourselves to revalue relationshipsas underlying all learning. Like many teachers of young children, we werealready won over by the importance of our relationships with children, parents,and families and of children’s relationships with one another. The socioculturalviews of Vygotsky (1978) influenced our thinking about the essential relationalquality of all learning, particularly literacy learning. The idea of scaffolding suggeststhat all learning happens when a more able other mediates the learningthrough language and through the use of materials. This common idea gainedeven more credence as we viewed it from our Reggio lens. In addition, manyof us were familiar with Donna Skolnick’s (2000) work, which outlines a set ofrelationships that teachers might consider when planning for literacy learning:teacher to curriculum, child to curriculum, teacher to child, and child to child.All of this led us to consider relationships as the first and foremost concern ofteaching, and so the promotion and facilitation of children’s relationships withus, with one another, and with materials in the environment became critical.And Then There Was WorkshopWorking within this set of beliefs, we were introduced to the workshop approachto literacy (Calkins, 1994; Ray & Cleveland, 2004). After learning the structuresand tone of workshop teaching, we set up our classrooms so that the supportsfor workshop were ever present, through the availability of beautiful and justrightbooks, a variety of small teacher-constructed blank books, and a wealth ofmaterial for drawing and writing. We began our workshop teaching with thesimple and predictable structures suggested by Calkins:6 D Judith T. Lysaker
Mini-Lessons. We began each readers and writers workshop with amini-lesson that provided a focused look at some aspect of reading orwriting. We decided on the topics for mini-lessons based on our observationsof our students, as well as from our reading of authors like KatieWood Ray and Lisa Cleveland (2004). Most often our lessons addresseda teaching point through the purposeful use of children’s literature. Inspiredby Ray and others, we referred to these as mentor texts. We regularlyphotocopied the covers of mentor texts, labeled them for what theyoffered us as writers, and displayed them at the children’s eye level. Thematerial of text became a valued and lovely way of supporting skill andstrategy development in our young students. Often our mini-lessonswere organized into units of study that allowed us to stay with a particularidea or author for an extended period.Independent Reading/Writing. Mini-lessons were followed by independentreading or independent writing, though we found that ourstudents often effectively merged the two. In our early childhood classrooms,independent workshop time was neither silent nor independent.Children worked as readers and writers by reading and thinking aloud,by helping one another, and often by inventing new and interestingways of co-reading and co-writing. During this time, we held readingand writing conferences and documented these conferences through anecdotalnotes and other teacher-created record-keeping strategies.Share Time. Independent reading and writing ended with share time.Children often gathered together at a carpeted area in front of a big bookeasel and whiteboard to talk about their reading and writing work ofthe day. If writing had been the focus, we used share time to have thechildren read their work to peers and get feedback from their youngcollaborators. As teachers we used this time instructionally. We noticedaloud, in front of and with the children, what the author had done wellthat day as a writer. Similarly, at the end of a workshop focused on reading,children volunteered to tell their peers about what they had accomplishedas readers that day. And with careful teacher responses, we acknowledgedand built up the good reading work the students had done.First There Was Reggio D 7
Page 2 and 3: With immeasurable gratitude we dedi
Page 4 and 5: chapter 7A Look at Cultural Tools i
Page 6 and 7: workshops. The vision of this share
Page 8 and 9: IntroductionKey to all learning is
Page 10 and 11: moral and political than practical.
Page 12 and 13: Specifically, I describe the belief
Page 14 and 15: Gallas, K. (1994). The languages of
Page 16 and 17: grounded in an interdisciplinary fr
Page 18 and 19: ecording of their thinking, and the
Page 22 and 23: Our Own Pedagogic ExperimentWithin
Page 24 and 25: Cambourne, B. (1995). Towards an ed
Page 26 and 27: oom” for children to be active in
Page 28 and 29: stories and using the different kin
Page 35 and 36: had gained during their research an
Page 38 and 39: BibliographyChard, S. C. (1994). Th
Page 40 and 41: Judy: So this was a natural overlap
Page 42 and 43: are just amazing. If you don’t ta
Page 44: Well, Amanda, I wonder if you have

View a Sample Chapter - National Council of Teachers of English

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?