I ended these three weeks with a much higher quality of writing than I had hoped for and a completely different organization of the prewriting process. I learned so much from them in this short amount of time and it really has taught me a lot about how they see the world in an amazing, nuanced, and transferrable way. Please see the student progress examples at the bottom of this page, or click here to be directed to the landing page of Phase 1 for purely student work samples for a clear look at their progress.
Discovery 1 - Prewriting Organization
The biggest instructional-altering discovery was that they visualized their prewriting process completely differently than I thought. I was surprised when my picture-coded sentence planning and mapping worksheets failed – I thought that I had made everything so explicit and accessible. What I found out was something that I think is often true when teachers and adults approach teaching kids – we tend to overcomplicate things. We tend to think of how we would think of writing structure, and work backwards to strip down this mental framework to a level that would be comprehensible for a seven year old. I found that my students had much more advanced schema-building capacities and incredibly broad capacity for transfer than I originally estimated – allow me to explain. When graphic-organizing worksheets with sentence planners didn’t work, we moved to writing underneath the 5 W’s posters on our whiteboard, a process that looked similar to this:
By outlining this sentence, including the prepositions and connecting words (big discovery number two), students could take the sentence “In the morning, my sister splashed me in the pool because she wanted to win the water fight.” and strip it down to:
“In the WHEN, WHO WHAT at/in the WHERE because (pronoun) WHY.”
This enabled them to create endless combinations of deep, meaningful sentences with correct grammar and advanced sentence structure. Below, you will see a comparison of the number of 5W's included in students' writing, from their baseline writing assignment during week 1 to their final pieces for Frozen. The charts you see represent the two student we are following throughout this project, who are representative of the group and provide a more clear and concise view of the results.
It was amazing to see them dismantle this structure mentally as I asked them to please write a different sentence than the one on the board – their deconstruction truly showed deep knowledge of the concept and it did, in fact transfer to other subject areas! In both science and social studies, first grade students independently pointed out to the class that we could use the 5 W’s to make an awesome sentence, and even explained to the second graders how to do it! Talk about a dream come true! I was and still am floored by their excellence.
It was amazing to see them dismantle this structure mentally as I asked them to please write a different sentence than the one on the board – their deconstruction truly showed deep knowledge of the concept and it did, in fact transfer to other subject areas! In both science and social studies, first grade students independently pointed out to the class that we could use the 5 W’s to make an awesome sentence, and even explained to the second graders how to do it! Talk about a dream come true! I was and still am floored by their excellence.
2: Sentence Structure Unlocked - Connecting Words
One of the things I learned through this, that surprised me as well, was that they lacked the ability to place the articles, pronouns, and conjunctions in the sentence when we discussed it in chunks of the 5 W’s. This problem was alleviated by including these necessary components in our sentence mapping on the board, and they picked out those key elements when they made sentences of their own, showing that they then understood that these words were part of the essential structure of the sentence. Perhaps if I cut out these connecting words they would be able to add them back in now, and it was just a matter of novelty, but I think that including the glue that holds the 5 W’s together is a great model for them, and since our board writing was purely student-orated, teacher transcribed, it was still their words and their sentences that they were creating.
3: Media Types Motivate Differently
My third major discovery was that digital literacy writing prompts were much more captivating and motivating for the students than books. Given, this was based off of the showing of one movie, Frozen, later in the intervention, when they may have been more confident with the material and writing and therefore more engaged, but the difference between their engagement in Tacky and their fascination with Frozen, it would appear that the mediums were affecting the students and their writing. Frozen also offered music (which aids in memory) and several storylines, which catered to a wider range of student interest and drew them all in more. Although some may dismiss movies as a poor replacement for literacy and Frozen as just popular culture, the movie was not intended as a replacement for literacy – it is important that children can understand and show comprehension of multimedia formats and understand traditional storylines across popular culture. In fact, many standardized tests are biased due to their popular culture assumptions, and by exposing them to the classical plots in fictional narratives, we can better inform students and even the playing field. The characters’ facial movement and nonverbal cues in Frozen also may have helped the ELL students and the general student population interpret more familiar meaning clues rather than getting tied up in language.
Memory & Transfer
In both, the oration of the text significantly aided comprehension and both short term and long-term memory of events. Their improved comprehension of the text and multimedia has markedly increased their writing clarity as well, as seen to the right - the structure, combined with their increased examination and discussion made them much clearer writers and communicators.
It has been over a month since we did this phase and one of my students, during our discussion of American heroes for Social Studies, volunteered Tacky as an example of a hero and the whole group of first graders were able to retell and analyze Tacky’s actions and explain why they would be considered heroic. I am so incredibly proud of them.
It has been over a month since we did this phase and one of my students, during our discussion of American heroes for Social Studies, volunteered Tacky as an example of a hero and the whole group of first graders were able to retell and analyze Tacky’s actions and explain why they would be considered heroic. I am so incredibly proud of them.