Gallagher 2011; Graves 1994; Ray 2001; Routman 2005). These are writing routines that have no research support.
Students need to be writing across the curricula, and often. Reading is often described as the invisible process that therefore needs lots of think alouds and teacher demonstrations to make it “visible,” but I would argue that a writer’s process needs an equal amount of modeling.
What’s the through line of the core practices that do work? I’d say it’s authenticity. Yep, that’s another term used so often it loses meaning, so I’ll define it for myself and for this book as meaning being respectful of students’ maturity. Children don’t need or want cutesy, and their nose for busywork is sharper than a hound dog’s. Be authentic with them instead. They want to feel they are in the same reading club and the same writing club as you are. So as you will see in these lessons, share the books and other texts that you truly adore. Share the op-eds, reviews, sports stories, news that irritated you, or inspired you—and they will follow suit. Share pieces of writing you’ve received or done that have something to teach them. Tell them about what’s hard or easy for you as a writer. Ask them for permission when you want to share what they have written with others. This last point leads into the third facet of integration that drives this book: peer models.
Think Peer Models and Peer Collaboration
Toward the end of each sequence, you’ll see I included writing samples from students and also have a page called “Peer Power: How to Use Student Work as Mentor Texts.” Integrating students’ writing into the weave of your reading and writing instruction is as important as integrating standards. Let me repeat that: it’s as important as integrating standards. Student writing as mentor texts functions like the Panama Canal, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. When kids read and discuss each other’s work, suddenly the “continents” of reading and writing connect, the passageway is clear! The purpose of reading and the purpose of writing suddenly matter because the writer is right there to embody the ideas, answer questions, clarify. And in the push for authentically student-driven dialogue, it makes such sense to use student pieces because students can more naturally pose and pursue the questions when they or peers “own” the texts at the heart of the discourse.
So as you embark on teaching with these sequences, I encourage you to begin to build a bank of student work and use it. Often. Used in combination with the work of published writers, it’s powerful.
Students’ written work is also, of course, the data to look at in order to figure out what you might want to teach next. The pages of student work are called “What Do I See?” to encourage that kind of daily and weekly assessment that the best teachers do. Spot the kids who need a small-group reteach; spot the child who needs one-on-one support. Spot the students who you suddenly see would work really well together on some aspect of reading and writing. This wise, informed “seeing” of kids’ written work (and verbal work for that matter) leads into the fourth and final facet of integration I want to point out—bringing an even greater degree of intention to integrating reading and writing.
Think Intentional Teaching
Teach with intention is another bit o’ wisdom that talking heads in education use, and as a practicing teacher of twenty-nine (!) fourth graders, my response is often an eye roll and followed by “Well, duh!” said with the perfect pitch intonation of a ten-year-old. Like we’re gonna just go in and wing it without plans and hope students pick up a few skills by spring? It’s all the more ironic, then, that I actually think highly enough of the concept of integrating more intentionality into our days to give it a real presence in this book. But my brand of intentionality is really, really concrete, even mechanical. You will see it show up in two ways in these sequences. Well, maybe three.
The first way is the sequence itself—the very notion of purposely linking reading and writing in a day, connecting it to the work you and students do with language, grammar, and so on.
The second way intentionality makes its mark is the If/Then Chart provided within the Next Instructional Steps section that follows each sequence, where I show you the things I tend to assess and evaluate—and then what I do with it in terms of going forward. All of our teaching—and really, all of our life—is one big If/Then—but here, with the If/Then Chart, I’m highlighting the process of intentionally evaluating students’ learning in order to respond and intentionally, incisively, plan subsequent lessons and conferences.
The third way I help you think about intentional teaching is through the three-week unit calendars provided for each sequence at www.corwin.com/commoncorecompanion. As I mentioned, each sequence is a week or two of instruction; the exact duration is up to you. You can dive in to any of these sequences, do them start to finish, and call it a day. Or, you can begin by looking at the more ambitious four-week unit plan, and use it to help you try units of study for the first time or deepen them. Then the sequence tucks within the unit. The reality is, any one of these sequences can springboard into a longer unit of study. The minute you combine worthy standards, rich texts, interesting questions, relevant writing ideas—well, it’s like Mentos in a cola bottle. Expect a fizzy explosion of further questions, information, additional texts, and discussion. By planning a unit of study, you take command of the line of inquiry, and you guide students in ways that better ensure you use the weeks wisely and address key skills and content along the way.
Flip back a few pages to the sectionBooster Lessons, At a Glance. There, you get a visual tour of the recurring features of the sequence and its purpose. This will give you a vivid sense for how lessons connect to each other, and how all the ELA standards meld together in a seamless whole.
Intentionality. Use this guide to fit your needs and more importantly your students’ needs. Mark it up, take the parts that work for you—but remember best practice. Keep an eye on the core practices and think of how you’re implementing them. But most importantly keep this one thought at the forefront—are you teaching your students to read, write, and think—and to love doing it?
To Wendy Murray, my dear friend and editor extraordinaire! This book is as much yours as it is mine. It would make our fathers proud.
Lesson Sequence 1 Integrating Opinion Writing With Evaluating Argument
In this lesson sequence, students look at craft and structure: what authors do to make a piece of writing hang together. To read critically, students need to be able to read with an eye to discerning the author’s purpose, and the point of view at work. To write convincingly, writers need to know how to make a case. I feature fourth-grade lessons; however, it is easily adapted for third and fifth grade (see pages 22–24).
This sequence is best done at the beginning of the year. It sits most naturally within a reader’s and writer’s workshop but can be imported into any curriculum.
Task
After you have read a traditional fairy tale and the “fractured” version, write a compare/contrast piece. Make sure to include point of view and examples from the text.
If you are a teacher using a basal series, this sequence can augment a study on compare and contrast, author’s purpose and point of view, or character traits and literary terms. The question to ask yourself is what do you need? For example, does your class need a “booster shot”—a quick injection to get kids acquainted with point of view (POV)? If that’s it, start at the sequence’s beginning on page 4. Or, if you want to build the POV lessons into a unit of study on craft and structure, visit www.corwin.com/thecommoncorecompanion
