Unit 19.01.08 | Yale National Initiative®

Teaching Strategies

There are six main components to teaching this unit. Mentor texts, close reads, turn and talk, student- teacher conference, and anchor charts. These strategies will be used through out the unit, which last 9 weeks. This is a unit on 1^st grade narrative writing.

Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are books that will be mentors to teach students how to write. These texts are the examples that students look at to see how to do something they have never done before. For this unit we will be looking at personal experience text. Jen Vincent describes mentor texts as; “Mentor texts or anchor texts are any text that can be used as an example of good writing for writers. Writers use a mentor text to inform their own writing.” Catherine Reed who is a 1^st grade teacher states “ Mentor texts offer students a ‘real’ perspective on a genre and give students a ‘real’ author to model.”

Research has shown that reading and writing should not be taught in isolation but unfortunately many of the reading and writing curriculums has teachers doing exactly that. Many of us teach reading blocks or workshops and a separate writer’s workshop. There is no true integration with each other. Hodges and Matthews found that using mentor texts, more specifically nonfiction text, helps improve not only in reading but writing also. They found that the students also were more confident and able to analyze text in both reading and writing.

Close Reads

When using mentor texts teachers should also employ the use of close reading. Lester Laminack found;

“that returning as a reader to a text (or a small set of texts) again and again over time leads to deeper and deeper in- sights about the nuances of why the writer made particular choices. Learning to think about a text through the lens of how the writer’s choices (e.g., craft moves, text structures, language, vocabulary) influence your construction of meaning leads a student writer to insights about why the writer made each choice. Yes, we all love a good booklist, but the true work of mentoring comes from the relationship the reader-writer develops with a particular text. Without that relationship, the deep insight about the nuances in the writing and trust in the writer, the text is just a set of moves to mimic in an effort to please a teacher.”

Close reading is a teaching strategy where students are able to dive deeply into a book and study the text structures, details, tone, organization, vocabulary, and other themes of the text, through repeated readings.⁶

The four books that will be used for this unit are: Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson by Jane Yolen, Mango Moon by Diane de Anda, and Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall. Each Kindness is a personal narrative of a little girl named Chole. When a new girl named Maya comes to class and tries to befriend Chole and the other girls in the class she is repeatedly rejected. When Chole is unable to participate in a class project about kindness, she decides to become friends with Maya only to discover that is not as easy as she thought it would be. The second book is Owl Moon is also written as a personal experience from a child’s perspective. A little girl and her father go out “owling” the story is about the companionship they share as they look for owls. The third book is Mango Moon and tells of a young girls life after her father is deported. The fourth book is Jabari Jumps this story tells of the day Jabari jumps off the diving board.

The books that I’ve chosen are very diverse in both characters as well as how the personal narratives are written and the themes. Each Kindness explores what it really means to be kind and how it feels when you lose that opportunity to show kindness. The main character of the book is an African American girl. Owl Moon is very poetic and is told from the eyes of a little white girl. Mango Moon is about how a young Latina girl’s life in unhinged due to the deportation of her father. Jabari Jumps is written from a boy’s view and he is African American. It is very important that I use books that represent as many cultures so that my students can see themselves in what we are reading as the texts are the base of their writing.

Turn and Talk

This is teaching strategy is also known as interactive talk and it allows students to develop their oral language, conversational skill, increase vocabulary, listening skills, and deepen the understanding of the text before they begin writing. Students are able to share their thoughts without the risk of feeling they will get the answer wrong in front of the teacher and whole class. It is at this time that teacher can also listen to see if there are any misconceptions and will be able to address them quickly. Turning and talking to a partner allows the students to process the information while keeping them engaged and breaking up the learning.

Student-Teacher Conferencing

This teaching strategy focuses more on the writing. Student-teacher writing conferencing allows the students to have one on one time with the teacher focusing on what the student wrote. It is during this conference that teachers must be careful in how they approach the writing of the student. It has been shown that students respond better to the conference when it is student led and the teacher is an active listener or audience to the student’s writing.⁷

Donald Gloves gives us 6 guideline to have a successful conference:

There should be a predictable structure
The teacher should only focus on a few points
The teacher should have solutions to students' problems
Allow the student to be the teacher
Use appropriate and related vocabulary
Promote the pleasure of writing.

Anchor Charts

With the common core standards requiring that 1^st graders read and understand complex text as well as being able to write narratives, opinion, and informational text it can be difficult for them to remember everything being taught. Anchor charts are wonderful resources that students can use to help them remember different concepts through out the year.

Using anchor charts has been a teaching strategy for a few years. Victoria Oglan states:

“These charts help students learn and represent key ideas, vocabulary, concepts, and other important information being studied; they also help students see the connections between reading and writing. Anchor charts are thinking charts that demonstrate proficient reading and writing; they are mental pictures, constituting visual representations of learning. Linder helps teachers use anchor charts in intentional ways to address the increasing reading and writing demands of the CCSS (Oglan, 2015).

Anchor charts can also be created with the whole class so that the students have a sense of ownership of the information on the chart. Because they were part of making the charts they refer to them often.

Bacchioni and Kurstedt list why anchor charts are needed;

Anchor charts help to build a community as students work together to create them.
Anchor charts make thinking visible
Anchor charts have relevant and current learning accessible
Anchor charts are documents of instruction
Anchor charts are scaffold for the visual and English learners
Anchor charts support students independence because when they need help they look to the charts

Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 19.01.08

Writing through Reading