The Art of Writing and Revision

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” – Langston Hughes

Introduction

As a third-grade English Language Arts teacher, I am always looking for more effective ways to teach reading and writing. Through our current district-wide curriculum, our learning is scaffolded. We introduce students to a story. We discuss the content and background knowledge of the topic. We read the text and answer essential questions about the text. The students are assigned a list of questions where they document their answers in complete sentences. The sentences are corrected, and we move on to the next assignment. There is rarely time to dive deeper into our school-based unit writing.

I assign my students fun writing prompts when time permits. This is the style of writing that the students enjoy the most.  One example of this type of prompt is: What should Mrs. Lemon be for Halloween this year? This was a fantastic prompt. Students had to write at least five sentences and illustrate once they were finished. Most students said that I should be a lemon or Beyoncé, but almost every student was engaged in this project. In my created curriculum unit, I want to combine fun writing prompts with research-based writing. Students will then revise and end by creating an art integration piece.

Numerous obstacles can make it difficult to achieve this classroom goal.  One issue is a lack of time.  Once we finish a unit, we quickly move on to the next unit or assignment. Meanwhile, half of my students miss instruction weekly due to their gifted and talented or instrumental classes. Other obligations occurring during the same class period mean students miss the beginning or end of a lesson. These students are usually only able to finish certain sections of the lesson. Reading and workbook pages fit into that allotted time but writing and revision are left outwant students to have the opportunity to read, write, and revise through every lesson. I would like to help students become more independent learners through a workshop model. Adding project-based learning into our current curriculum will assist students to become more independent. Our lessons will go beyond traditional books and paper. The purpose of this unit is to not only teach research and writing techniques, but to help them grow as independent learners.

This curriculum unit will have students writing a researched narrative. As an extension of their research, students will have the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity through art integration. Scaffolding the writing process will begin with daily jots and journal entries based on a prompt that reflects the prior day's reading. Students will then connect these writings for their final draft of their research paper. Students will review basic writing goals and procedures. presentations will round out this unit. The unit should take roughly five weeks, taking into consideration student and time availability. While executing this curriculum unit, I will take students’ different reading and writing skill levels into account. Workshopping will allow students to assist one another as we scaffold through the writing process. This will give me a lot more time to work with students that need extra help or have missed parts of the assignment. 

As a parent and a teacher, I have found the best way for students to become better readers is or them to read as much as they can.  I encourage my own children as well as my students to read whatever interests them. From my youngest child sounding out street signs on the way to school, to my oldest browsing the web for current events articles, anyone can find numerous opportunities to read. Our daily warm-up or early-finisher activity is often to read a book. We have a 100-book initiative in our school, and students are rewarded for reading. This school year, we read The Wild Robot,¹ by Peter Brown. The class would gather on the carpet, and we would take turns reading. After we read a few chapters, we would stop and discuss how the characters made us feel. Then the conversation would unfold and extend naturally. This experience began to feel very organic. We finished the book but were not able to move forward with the series due to time constraints. This experience gave me the idea of integrating the idea of organic reading into our lessons.

Meanwhile, moving to the workshop model for reading and writing in my classroom will teach students skills that will help them comprehend and eventually become better writers. According to Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson, authors of Real-World Writers: “In reading workshop classrooms, children read for pleasure, and book discussions become a natural part of their literate lives. As children become better readers, a similar improvement occurs in writing (Ferguson and Young 2021).²

The article “Teaching Students to Write Sentences: A Review of the Literature” (Ritchey et al. 2023, 317-332)³  discusses how students have difficulty writing sentences for many reasons. Some students have simply never been taught to write a sentence. Other students may struggle with not knowing how to express their thoughts or how to spell certain words. “At the sentence level, writers must leverage multiple knowledge sources, including vocabulary to represent ideas, syntax to combine words in meaningful ways, morphology to inflect words, change word meaning, and derive new parts of speech.”⁴ (Ritchey et al. 2023, 317-332)  The lessons in my curriculum unit will help students overcome their challenges by progressing from simple sentences to more complex ones. I will model sentence structure with the students through my own journal entries and writings.