Infusing Grammar Into the Writer's Workshop

A Guide for K-6 Teachers

Amy Benjamin, Barbara Golub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317566267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Help your students improve their language skills and become stronger readers and writers. In this timely book, literacy experts Amy Benjamin and Barbara Golub offer best practices for fortifying the writer's workshop model with meaningful, relevant instruction in grammar.

The book answers questions such as…

• 
  
  

• What does a writer's workshop look like and how does it fit into balanced literacy models? How does grammar fit into a writer's workshop?

• 
  
  

• How can you use natural language acquisition to transition children from non-Standard to Standard English patterns?

• 
  
  

• How can you teach students to identify a complete sentence?

• 
  
  

• What are effective ways to teach parts of speech?

• 
  
  

• How can you build on nouns and verbs to teach adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and dependent clauses?

In each chapter, you'll find out exactly what teaching the targeted concept looks like in a workshop classroom. Examples are provided for different grade levels and can be adapted as necessary to meet your needs.

This book is a No-Worksheet Zone. You'll learnhow to present grammar using authentic text and talk, leading to more durable learning.

1 A Look at Balanced Literacy and Reading-Writing Workshop

10.4324/9781315736204-2

Barb

A few months back, I started training for my first half-marathon. I never thought that I would have the desire to run a marathon, let alone complete one. As I did more and more research into training programs and what it takes to run 13.1 miles in one session, I learned quickly that running was a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Without the right diet, I would not be able to fuel myself properly for the hours of running that lay ahead. Without balancing short runs, long runs, rest days, cross-training, and stretching, I would be setting myself up for injury. Without setting smaller goals, it would be less likely that I would meet my larger goal. As determined as I was to start and finish the race, I became just as determined to get all of the different parts of training firmly in place.

Over the past seven years that I have been supporting teachers, I have met hundreds upon hundreds of them and one question shows up, no matter if I am in Chennai, India; Bloomington, Indiana; or Brooklyn, New York: Why isn’t my workshop working? So many educators wonder why, no matter how tight their mini lesson, how targeted their conferences, how skillful their groupings, their children remain disengaged or failing to advance in their learning.

Just as each piece of my marathon training was a necessary component for my success, so are all of the pieces of balanced literacy (and reading and writing workshops are only one piece) necessary for the success and growth of students. One of the great misunderstandings in the world of literacy education is that reading and writing workshops are the be-all, end-all of literacy instruction. They are not. When we are talking about balanced literacy, we are talking about:

• Shared Writing
• Interactive Writing
• Guided Reading
• Word Study
• Shared Reading
• Read Aloud With Accountable Talk
• Reading Workshop
• Writing Workshop

Each of these components stands alone in the classroom.

Below, you will find a brief description of each component. I believe that all these components are critical to helping students become literate; I cannot stress enough that each piece is an important part of the whole. I have ordered them in terms of how much time they will take across your day. Timing is crucial when thinking about balanced literacy. It is easy for 10 minutes to become 15 minutes to become 20 minutes. In the military, they call this kind of thing “mission creep.” Although it’s difficult, we have to adhere to time limits for the components of balanced literacy.

Shared Writing

Shared writing is a whole-class activity where the teacher sits at the front of the meeting area and, with input from the class, composes a writing piece on chart paper or an interactive whiteboard. While you are leading the class in the collaborative effort of composing, you are doing the actual writing. The shared writing component is seen more regularly in kindergarten through second grade classrooms, but I’ve had success using it to model new genres of writing in grades 3–6.

As we are crafting sentences with students, we can naturally bring in grammatical concepts and terminology: “OK, let’s come up with a stronger verb here.” “Let’s reverse these clauses.” “Do we need a comma here?” “What would be our best conjunction to join these sentences?” “Oh! I see that I can get rid of this whole sentence by turning this noun phrase into an appositive.” When students hear terminology being used as the concept is applied right before their eyes, it’s not as daunting as you may think.

Interactive Writing

Interactive writing kicks shared writing up a notch, giving the students a greater role in actually writing the piece. During an interactive writing session, which is typically no more than 15 minutes outside of your workshop time, you sit in front of chart paper or the interactive whiteboard, writing implement in hand, guiding the class to co-compose a collaborative piece of text. What a perfect opportunity this is to point out the application of various grammatical concepts, such as subject-verb agreement, choice of verb tense, pronoun-antecedent clarification, use of modifiers, and, of course, punctuation. The more you use authentic terminology as you do so, the more comfortable the children (and you) will be with it.

Students come up to contribute a sentence or two in the writing at the teachable moments when the shared text calls on them to practice a newly learned skill, or an already-taught skill that requires further support. We are not setting children up to make errors, rather we are supporting them with whatever they may be inaccurately using, but confusing (Bear … Invernizzi, 2007). Your students may still be working on end punctuation or vowel patterns inside of a word. When opportunities for practicing these skills come up in the shared text, call on students to do the writing. And again, the use of authentic terminology, as with the use of all kinds of language, makes learning easier and more memorable. The human brain loves to have names for things, and terminology is most likely to stick when accompanied by the concept-in-action, rather than when “taught” as a definition, outside of its context. Imagine that you are learning carpentry from a master carpenter on the job. Would it be better to learn the names of the tools as you and your mentor are working with them, or would you rather be told about all of the tools at once and then be expected to use them correctly?

Guided Reading

Guided reading is a method of teaching children in a small group. Children are grouped according to the information learned from reading assessments: areas of shared difficulty, or reading processes that the children need to know in order to move into the next reading level. All children in the group read the same text after the teacher has introduced the text. It is important to note that the texts that children are using during a guided reading session should be accessible to children. That is, most of the work required is work that children can already do. Reading accessible text increases fluency, builds background knowledge, and supports observational skills about the visuals of reading: capitalization, spelling, punctuation, affixes. What reading accessible text does not necessarily do is build vocabulary (if there are no unfamiliar words) or build the inferential reading skills that require close reading. Close reading is not required for accessible text. Close reading is required for demanding text, text that is beyond the reader’s comfort level.

In some schools, guided reading occurs during the reading workshop. When children are reading independently, the teacher is pulling guided reading groups. These groups last anywhere from 10 to 12 minutes, so the amount of guided reading that happens across a day or week depends on how long the rest of the children in the class can read independently. In other schools, guided reading is a separate time of the day. In this scenario, the classroom teacher is working with a guided reading group, while the rest of the class is engaged in different reading activities. These activities can range from iPad reading to reading-based games and puzzles.

Word Study

Word study (aka, word work) is a crucial part of the balanced literacy framework, but is often overlooked. A common unfounded criticism of balanced literacy is that it leaves no space for spelling instruction. This is not true.

A favorite method for word study is word sorting, where children carefully examine and then classify words according to specific spelling features, such as affixes, digraphs, diphthongs, double letters, silent letters. With word sorting, children discover different patterns of letters in words, thus deriving rules that can be applied to new, unknown words. Word study is a stand-alone time of the day, and with children working independently in small groups. It typically takes about 15 minutes.

Word study time is amenable to grammar instruction: How do we change the spelling when adding a suffix that turns a noun into an adjective? Whenever we have a verb, we can add ‘-ing’ to it. Note that the suffix ‘-ly’ allows an adjective to become an adverb, etc. Word study time can also be used to explore sentence structure: What groups of words in the text constitute a complete sentence? How do we know? What kinds of punctuation do we have in our texts? Why?

Shared Reading

Shared reading is a collaborative learning activity, based on research by Don Holdaway (1979), that emulates and builds from the child’s experience with bedtime stories. In early childhood classrooms, it typically involves a teacher and a large group of “children sitting closely together to read (and reread), in unison, carefully selected enlarged texts” (Parkes, 2000). Often, this text presented in the form of a “big book,” which can also display a poem or a song. When planning for shared reading, I ask myself, “What are my goals for this week?” and then, “What big book (or song, or poem) can help me reach those goals?” Shared reading is critical in kindergarten and first grade classrooms. In the later grades, the shared reading structure might take place with smaller groups of children (not necessarily whole class).

If you address the meaning-making purpose of punctuation, you can address important grammatical issues in the course of shared reading. Commas are not there just to look pretty, nor do commas have anything to do with “taking a breath.” Commas help us read a sentence according to the author’s intention about how words in sentences are to be grouped and processed. Skillful readers know how to use marks of punctuation the way skillful drivers use road signs.

The Read-Aloud With Accountable Talk

An effective read-aloud with accountable talk session is a time to support the development of reading comprehension across different genres. It is a time to teach students the importance of conversational skills. The read-aloud is a time to build community around a shared love and appreciation of books.

Read-aloud with accountable talk time can last anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your schedule and the ability of your students to sustain a conversation around books.

When you are reading, please be aware that you are revealing your “reading brain” to the children. This lets the internal work of a reader come to life. Remember, they are still learning to internalize this work that you, the adult reader, do naturally. This means that as you are reading, you are stopping and sharing your internal dialogue with the children (“Whoa, that part was intense. It made me think of&”). You are also stopping and prompting children to get ready for talk in the ways mentioned above. Use grammatical terminology as you speak, even if you are introducing new terms. Remember that we learn most words (and grammatical terms are just words, after all!) by hearing them used repeatedly in a rich context.

Reading Workshop

If the first six components discussed in this chapter are the practices and scrimmages, then your reading and writing workshops are the games. In your workshops, children have the opportunity to put together what they have learned from each piece of your balanced literacy pie. In reading workshop, it might be that the work of thinking and talking through texts that children have practiced during read-alouds with accountable talk is transferring to how they are thinking and writing about their independent reading books. Or, as you have been teaching children to use language patterns to spell words during word study, you can teach them how to transfer this information to decoding tricky words.

Grammar instruction is usually associated with writing and speaking. But what we understand about grammar can make us better readers as well. For example, when we get lost inside a long and complicated sentence, we can stop and say: “Wait a minute. What’s my subject and verb here? How many clauses do I have?” Smart readers know how to break a sentence down, which means foregrounding the subject and verb to get the basic meaning, and then adding modifiers to that core.

Writing Workshop

Like its reading counterpart, writing workshop follows a thread of beliefs centering around the idea that when children are engaged with self-selected topics, in this case writing topics, they can put the all of the parts and pieces of writing together in a meaningful way. Through your work in interactive writing, for example, you have taught children how to compose a text, and then how to construct a text using words and letters, phrases and sentences. Through your work in shared reading, you have taught your children how books tend to go: beginning, middle, end. Through your reading workshop, you have taught children that authors make deliberate choices about character development. What children have learned about reading helps them learn to write coherently. Writing is informed by reading far more than writing is improved by direct instruction in writing.

In a writing workshop, children generate their own ideas. Teachers do not give children a daily prompt. Instead, children learn strategies for thinking of ideas, elaborating upon them, and revising the writing that grows out of them. As writing workshop teachers, we teach across four elements of good writing: meaning, elaboration, structure, conventions (Serravallo, 2013). When we teach across the genres of narrative, informational, and persuasive writing, we teach a variety of lessons across these elements. Grammar instruction is relevant to all four elements of good writing when it transcends the mere correction of surface errors and addresses clarity and coherence.

General Workshop Information

Your workshops can last anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, depending on your students’ level of engagement, stamina, and developmental level. I find no greater joy than when students groan when workshop has come to an end. This, however, does not always come automatically—for you or your students—particularly if you are newer to this kind of work and are still working out the kinks.

It is helpful to recognize that your reading and writing workshops have the same parts: mini lesson, independent work time, mid-workshop interruption, partner time, teaching share.

Most workshop time is spent with children working independently. This independent work time happens after your 10 minute mini lesson has ended. One thought you may be having at this point is, “I know why my workshop isn’t working—the students are engaging in too much independent work time!” Independent work time is the time where the most powerful teaching happens. During the independent work time, you are conducting one-to-one conferences with individual students.

What I’ve Learned

The fact that I am steeped in the work of grammar is sometimes difficult for me to grasp. Like many of my colleagues, I had the idea that if grammar were to be taught in the context of writing, it would be a fix-up strategy, rather than as a tool to make writing powerful from the get-go, and throughout the writing process of brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. I thought that my students had to apply the rules of Standard English grammar to make their writing easier to read. I focused a lot of my teaching on helping children find a voice, and I never once considered the fact that grammar could be the thing that would help them to do exactly that.

We can teach grammar as a technique to help childre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Editor Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Look at Balanced Literacy and Reading-Writing Workshop
• 2 Accelerated Auditory Patterning: How Is Standard English Supposed to Sound?
• 3 Is This a Complete Sentence? Is This a Run-on Sentence? Do I Need a Comma?
• 4 Beyond Person, Place, or Thing: Teaching Parts of Speech
• 5 Building on Nouns and Verbs: Phrases and Clauses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography