Multimodal Poetry Response

A few weeks ago, Voicethreads, an interactive sharing site was mentioned in our class. A third grade class' thread is an example of how students use art, voice, and interpretation to share their work and others can comment and participate in the work. Comments can be made by voice recording, video, keyboarding, and even using a cell phone! Check out their thread!

Shelly Blake-Plock is a high school teacher and authors the blog Teach Paperless. He said, "Before I went paperless and used blogs to get information from them, I would only see students' work if they wrote an essay or turned in a quiz or test. Now I'm seeing what they're working on all the time..."

As I read e339 blogs this week, I learned more about each of you and your "process" in selecting and researching the topic for the multigenre research paper. It was another form of "inside sentences" that Hale talked about in Crafting Writers. I experienced another advantage of blogging for students AND teachers!

Help!

The Indiana Partnership for Young Writers is a wonderful resource for pre-service and practicing teachers of writing. Ms. Mary Wordsmith is an interactive blog that you might want to visit.

http://marywordsmith.blogspot.com/

Reading Like a Writer

How many of you looked at other blogs before writing your own? I did! I wanted to "notice" the kinds of writing that this new genre (for me) was all about. That is reading like a writer. In my elementary classroom, after spending several days immersed in reading the genre we would be writing, I selected a piece or page from one of the texts and asked students what they noticed about the writing. In the beginning comments like "they used periods at the end of their sentences" or "they told what happened" were common but soon students' noticings about structure and craft in writing were showing up in their own writing! The chapters in Crafting Writers K-6 reminded me of the personal power to improve writing that learning to read like a writer affords to authors of all ages.