Transcript

This is a board that I set up for students to use during writer's workshop and during other times of the day when we're thinking about writing. One of the things I noticed was that my students were having a difficult time finding a reason to write, not all of them but some of them. There was a good group of students in my class who didn't find writing meaningful. And so, along with my colleagues in the school we came up with what we felt would be a good way to address that. We felt that students needed to learn that writing is purposeful, that when writers write they start out with a reason for that writing. And so we very strategically sought to teach the students about how writers think about writing. We didn't focus too much on the form; we looked really at what are writers thinking when they engage in some sort of writing. What we looked at first was why writers write, and we looked at purpose. And we talked with students about how when writers write there's a reason for it, and that reason isn't my teacher told me to write, it's because writers have something to say. And we began looking at different texts as models and trying to determine what the purpose for those texts was, and we came up with a list and we made a web that shows some of the different reasons for writing, to teach, to inform, to find out, to tell how to, and so on. And we started to model different aspects of that for students. 

I showed students one example, one of the confusions that my students had was I would say what is your purpose for writing and they would give me their topic. What's your purpose for writing? Hockey. What form are you going to write in? Hockey. So, students did not have a clear sense that topic was a separate concept from purpose and from form. So I started to break that down for students and show them through modelling that you can take one topic and break it down into many different purposes, for different audiences that take different forms, and I really needed to do that one thorough purpose to get students familiar with the idea, to get them comfortable with the concept that we begin with a purpose for our topic, and the topic I chose was butterflies, it's something the students are always interested in and something they bring a lot of background knowledge to. And I gave them two different scenarios for why someone might want to write about butterflies. The first was, you're in the playground and you see somebody at recess squish a butterfly for no reason. That gives you a very powerful purpose for writing and we talked about how you might want to write to someone to find out why they did that. 

So what we came up with together and co-wrote, I did the writing while students shared the ideas, was a letter to the butterfly squisher, and we actually called it a not-so-friendly letter. Students were already familiar with letter form, and what we worked through together were the ideas that would be in that letter. And through going through that example students understood that the purpose was not butterflies, it was to find out why someone would do that to a butterfly. The audience was the person who squished the butterfly and the form was a letter, because that's the most authentic thing to write to someone when you want to find out why in a situation like that. Then we constructed another scenario where a student is outside at recess and just sees a butterfly chrysalis on a leaf, and is struck by the wonder of that, like first grade and second grade students are, they just love these experiences of seeing these real life things, and how might you present that in writing if you come in after recess and you're excited about that. We thought you might want to teach about the wonder of the butterfly lifecycle. 

So again with students I took their ideas and showed them how you could create a simple lifecycle of a butterfly using pictures with a few words. And I did that very deliberately. The letter model was very word heavy. It would appeal to the students who see themselves as big text writers who want to write a lot. And then the other model presented a different option for those students who don't feel ready to write a full letter or to write at length. They had something lighter, something a little less risky to approach that could still convey a very authentic purpose. So through showing those two examples I modelled for students and shared with them that idea that writers start with a topic and a purpose, and once purpose is determined, audience and purpose together dictate the form.