Katy Rehus CI 476 February 10, 2012 2nd Grade Writing Workshop Observations Currently I am placed in a 2nd grade

classroom at White Heath Elementary, a school of 225 2nd-and 3rd grade students in Monticello District 25, White Heath, Illinois. The school is 98.2% white, boasts a 96.3% attendance rate, passes AYP, has an average class size of 18.8, has 0.0% limited English proficiency, and a low income rate of 18.7% compared to the state average of 42.9%. (Illinois State Board of Education, 2009) My classroom, in particular, sees 21 students pass in and out of the doors each day. All of the students in the class are native English speakers, and only are granted minutes for special education. As a whole, their reading scores are higher than both those of the national averages and the rest of the White Heath 2nd-grade averages. As a whole, their writing is below average and below benchmark goals by AIMS Web scoring. In my placement classroom, the writing program used to be centered on a basal approach where everyone in the class read one story and responded to it. Monticello has moved towards guided reading groups based on levels. My cooperating teacher, Sally Olson,

said of the newer system that they have e changed 2nd-grade to strategy teaching and decoding for story structure, sequence, decoding, fantasy realism, compare and contrast, connecting, cause and effect, character traits, inferring, generalizations, main idea, and detail.f During the first half of the year, the Lucy Caulkins handbooks

for writing workshops are used for planning instruction, and during the second half of the year the focus of writing is frames, reports, and more structured kind of writing. I was very glad to not work with the Lucy Caulkins workshop manuals. I used them for writing instruction in my early field placement last semester, and I found the lessons to be repetitive and too abstract to be a stand-alone sufficient writing curriculum. Much of Lucy Caulkinsd lessons are about stretching out small moments and allowing students to write about any topic of their choice. The problem that I see with this is that students tend to write about real events from their own lives and do not write about hypothetical or imagined situations without a prompt. Also, writing assessments for standardized testing are prompt-based, so if the standardized tests are to accurately show studentsd writing abilities, they should have practice writing to the format of the tests. Currently, we are working on the writing process, and what wed ve done in class matches up very well with the basic concept of writing

cycle from Writing Workshop, but student independence in revisiting stages of the cycle is not quite the same. Our class of 2nd graders is still learning that writing involves more than one step, so for now the format of workshops is more structured than Writing Workshops recommends. I think that itd s necessary for this part of their development as writers, and I hope to see them have more freedom to work within the cycle more independently. Overall, though, I like that the White Heath curriculum has a good balance have guided and free writing. When a student in the class is struggling with reading phonics skills, they might have difficulty with reading skills as well. Everyone is started on the Lucy Caulkins writing for small moments to get them excited for writing and introduce consistently writing in full sentences with capitalization and punctuation, but later on focus is turned towards IEPs. The teachers look at particular students and consider that they might not have to write as much as the others based on IEPs and the curriculum should be adjusted. I thought it was very interesting that at White Heath, students who have speech aid get special literacy help from that specialist. I went to a conference with a student, her parent, the classroom teacher, and the district speech specialist, and in the meeting we talked about how this particular

studentd s speech problems were causing trouble in her literacy. I had never really made this connection before, and it seemed so obvious to me afterwards. I think part of my blindness to the issue comes in part from lack of student-teacher individual reading and writing conferences. Mrs. Olson and I circulate around the room and help students while we roam, but Id d like to look into setting up lengthier, more personalized conferences like we read about in Writing Workshop. I thought there is a lot of student potential thatd s waiting to be unleashed in these intensive conferences. Since the teachers at White Heath have full creative liberties with their curriculum, the 2nd grade team of teachers plan their shared curriculum based on the Lucy Caulkins book at the beginning of the year, then it is supplemented with 6-trait writing activities later in the year that help with 3rd grade ISAT prep, and finally the state standards are considered, especially those regarding biographies and genres. Structured writing is guided by writing process chunks. There are five half-hour workshop sessions in a six-day rotation. Writing is part of the reading curriculum too, as part of responding to text, and later in the year students will write animal reports in science. Id d like to see more writing in other content

areas, but I also have mixed feelings about throwing too much writing at the students. I think sometimes when theyd re focused on their writing, and for some students writing can be challenging and thus demands a lot of attention, they lose out of some of the content of the lessons. Id ve seen students write long responses just copying what they saw written somewhere else, yet when asked about what it was they wrote, they had no idea what they were talking about. I think a happy medium would be including language and writing into assessment. Mrs. Olson said of her own integrating writing into other areas, e I know some teachers, and I know I dond t do enough of it, use written math responses for writing practice during math instruction.f Adjustments to the writing program are made through studentsd IEPs. For these students, language is varied. There is an RTI writing group and two or three of the students from our homeroom have writing enrichment daily. Writing is part of the assessment done three times each year that monitors progress, benchmarks, and helps determine RTI placement. Students in the RTI writing group dond t need to have an IEP to be in the group, students selected to be in the group are chosen based on the assessment results. No one in the class

is an ELL, AAVE, or dialect speaker, so that is not an issue that needs to be addressed when planning for instruction. As the writing curriculum for the second half of the year is based on state standards, the program meets the standards. Teachers use the state standards and formal and informal assessments to design the curriculum for the students. I think itd s a very efficient way of planning instruction. Recently, as a 2nd-grade team, we reviewed midyear assessment results and compared that with how we were grading students in each classroom, and some changes were made to the approach to writing instruction. My cooperating teacher and I decided that students needed to practice writing to prompts more regularly. The standardized tests use prompted writing, and since our students were not familiar with this type of writing, their overall writing skills were inaccurately represented in their scores. In Writing Workshop, the overlap between workshop and test environments was covered, and I liked seeing this visual and being able to apply it to my current experiences in the field. I think working with students on independent writing skills during workshop is what benefits them the most during testing when they need to write in a structured way they may not be entirely comfortable with; remembering strategies such as generating ideas before writing, anticipating readersd questions, using

supporting details, and proofreading can give them confidence during an intimidating test.

References Fletcher, R., & Portalupi, J. (2001). Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide. Portsmout, NH: Heinemann. Illinois State Board of Education. (2009). 2009 Illinois School Profile: A Brief Guide for Parents. Retrieved Jan 23, 2012, from ISBE: http://www.sages.us/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gi d=224&Itemid=144