February 2005 — Features
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The Impact of the AACTE-Microsoft Grant on Elementary Reading & Writing
The organization of writing was stressed during the fourth workshop session. State standards noted a narrative must have a good introductory paragraph, a strong concluding paragraph, a consistent flow and a strong sequence of events. Story, narrative and persuasive composition frames were demonstrated as were Fuller and Newman’s models (1994).
Workshop participants had more difficulty creating activities on organization than was observed during the previous writing target areas. Participants created 17 activities for their school’s writing database. The workshop leaders adhered to writers’ workshop ideas for organization of students’ composition folders (Strickland, Ganske and Monr'e 2002). The scheduling of writing session time and routines were also modeled for concise understanding of process writing stages, student groups and story publication. The participants were unfamiliar with writers’ workshop techniques, so the presenters used the “Four-Blocks” literacy model to provide teachers with a strategic framework for guided and independent reading, as well as writing and word analysis (Cunningham and Allington 2003).
The fifth workshop combined the two writing target areas of conventions and integration. The Illinois standards for conventions state that writing errors should be minimal and not interfere with the author’s ability to communicate. Integration in writing involves focus, supporting details and balance. Research on transitional words and conventions, as illustrated by Hacker (2000) and O’Hare and Funk (2000), was presented to the participating teachers.
The workshop participants were then encouraged to expand the compositions of elementary students by adding transitional words (phrases and clauses), as well as punctuation in order to focus on proofreading, revising and editing. The functional approach to writing occurs when these three processes are conducted with young writers’ stories and not in isolated exercises (Fearn and Farnan 2001).
The proofreading concept was linked with the focus and organization workshops as teachers proofread authentic student writing samples for introductory paragraph clarity. Participants were also informed on how to guide students in the peer conference and editing processes; a procedural peer conference handout was provided for later use. A convention activity exemplified from the database is the “Writer’s Checklist,” which can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking on the related link at www.wiu.edu/users/lgb100/grant/conventions.html.
Integration instruction during the conventions and integration workshop included the target areas of consistency and idea continuity. The participants primarily designed integration activities and rubrics to check these areas. An example of their work, the integration activity “Butterscotch,” can be downloaded off the same Web site listed above.
Results
Teacher-Designed Activities. The first objective was for teachers to develop writing activities for the online database that would be shared among faculty members and with the WIU directors. Currently, 115 activities, including 12 conventions and 12 integration activities, have been listed on the V.I.T. Schools/WIU community online site. Since some of the activities were for teacher use, nine activities were not included on the Web site for student use.
