Response to Ray & Strickland

Ch.4

In this chapter Strickland talks about and explains about teaching Prewriting, Writers Notebook, Organizing Thoughts, Drafting and Responding to Writing, Keeping Track of Writers, Conferencing, Peer Response in Writing Conferences, Parading and Modeling for Students and Revision: Imagining the Better Text.

Strickland states that American schools are still in a "traditional mode focused on the alignment of a completed theme or essay with what is considered standard edited English." Strickland also says that the traditional method of writing is mostly on or focuses is on the product not the finish of the writing. Most of the time that is spent in the class is called the mechanics of all of the writing skills. Such as grammar, spelling, and usage of writing. Writing is so much more fun to the kids in the class when they get to pick their own topic and write about it. It is also good because the kids dont like to be assigned what to write because it is more boring to them and dont like when the teacher reads their paper. They like sometimes privacy about what they are writing because it might mean alot to them and dont want nobody to read it. The process approach just mainly focuses on the writing process, the writing that is learned, and creativity. Product approach is mostly more about the structure and the old time or the traditional way of teaching writing. The element of writing is about time, response, choice, structure, and community. Time is a big one because writing takes practice you cant just go and write and think your paper is good after the first draft. Also time is when they are having a writing workshop they can do 1 on 1 with the kids and check on their writing progress. Choice is about letting the kids make their own choice about what they want to write about. Also its their choice that they want to share through publication. Response is always good to have on the kids paper because it can show what they need to work on. Structure is all about having everything organized and in a structural way. During writing workshop you shouldn't control the writer but to have the framework that they need to do. Community is to respect each others ideas, viewpoints and accomplishments. A good way is to have a bulletin board outside of your class room and show how your kids are doing in the class. The best thing is to make sure that the students can trust their teacher and the teacher can trust her students.

Ray

Chapter 1: Understanding the essential characteristics of the writing workshop

In chapter 1 ray just goes over the characteristics of the writing workshop. Those consider as Choice about Content

Time for Writing

Teaching

Talking

Periods of Focused Study

Publication Rituals

High Expectations and Safety

Structured Management

Chapter 2: The necessity of a writing workshop in a day already full of writing

In this chapter there is two kinds of writing 1. They write to support their lives 2. they write to communicate ideas to others

It is important that we teachers needs to concentrate on writing as a composition because all the writing the kids do all day is composition. Composition is very hard and it takes along time to learn it.