Friday's discussion

From the readings on Monday there were a few points that I thought were interesting. In Society’s Child: Social Context and Writing Development I realized that social and economical background affects a student's writing and is shaped by the social interaction around them. It was also pointed out that one may backslide when writing a new genre. I totally agree with this point!!

In looking at my own son's papers, he may have had a wonderful letter to a friend with date, greeting, body and closing and no grammatical and mechanical errors. Then when he was told to write a fiction story with a beginning, middle, and ending. He had totally left out capital letters, periods, etc. I wanted to say--what happened here?!!!

On Wed our discussions of state standards led into high and low stakes testing. I fully agree that all writing on the K-2 side should be low stakes writing. In reviewing my son's work(and I only talk about him because as a librarian he is my connection to the regular classroom) he will come home and say, "I hate writing. I takes to long for me to hand in my paper. You have to make sure all the capital letters are there with periods at the end." However, on the week-end, he may totally have written a "book" (keep in mind this is a second grade level book) on Star Wars, but with quite a few misspellings and have left out periods and capital letters in places. He was totally focused on the content and it was his work.

There are several ideas I would like to carry over into the library instruction class and with the access of Moodle and the wireless lab that we will be using in the fall, I feel that it is actually attainable. I like for the students to respond to higher level, critical thinking questions that will be posted on Moodle from the classroom set of books that the AR program has. I would like to do the post-it note and museum activity and the write-arounds. Overall, I have enjoyed the class and have found it very useful for my library instruction.