SWB's lecture on Teaching Writing in the Elementary Years - thoughts and questions

[MomN]

I just finished listening to SWB's lecture on Teaching Writing in the Elementary Years.  It was very helpful.  Two things I wanted to ask about after listening:

1) SWB mentions that she does not support any dress-ups, basically saying she does not like IEW's curriculum in the elementary grades.  I wanted to get your thoughts on this.  Anyone who uses WWE but also likes IEW?  

2) SWB mentions that narrations should be done from short passages - I think she said 2 pages or under.  I was planning on having my 2nd grader (next year) read a Henry and Mudge type book and then orally tell me a narration about it.  Do you use narration with full books or do you stick with short passages?

 

TY!

Laura

[forty-two]

54 minutes ago, MomN said:

Anyone who uses WWE but also likes IEW?

I like to follow up WWE with SWI B.  I do make sure to explain that the mandatory dress-ups and banned words and such are exercises, not universal rules for good writing, though.  Their point is to shake you out of ruts, to force you to think of alternatives, to help you become comfortable with a range of constructions, not to be a prescription for all writing "in the wild".

1 hour ago, MomN said:

Do you use narration with full books or do you stick with short passages?

I do stick with short passages.  Just as an adult, I find summarizing a whole book at once to be a difficult task, at least to do it *well* - shorter is easier for me, too.  (When I'm summarizing on my own, I summarize in the largest chunks I can easily handle, then start grouping my summaries and summarizing them, until I've worked my way up to one overarching summary.)  Honestly, I never really consciously understood the process of summarization until I was on my second go-through of WWE with my middle.  I think there's a lot to be said to getting *plenty* of practice making genuinely good summaries of short passages before moving to increasing the length, as it's so easy to do bad or less-than summaries, especially as things get longer than your ability to handle them well.  Also, I think making good summaries of longer works starts to require more logical skills and the ability to see more abstract relationships, which tend to be stronger once you hit middle school.  A lot of what WWE is doing is developing a good intuitive feel for summaries, and it's easier to grasp the essence of shorter passages than longer ones, especially when you don't have formal tools for working through longer material.

[Lecka]

Honestly — Henry and Mudge mostly have 4 chapters/episodes.  I think narrating one chapter/episode would make sense.  
 

If you compressed one chapter of Henry and Mudge it would probably be 1-2 paragraphs.  
 

Anyway — I think it would make sense to narrate a chapter and it necessarily the whole book, if that was going to make more sense.

I also think depending on things — it could be good to also narrate something at a higher level than the child’s reading level.

I love Henry and Mudge books, both my sons have really connected with them.  

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by Lecka

[Lecka]

Anyway — I think all the chapters would be good to narrate by chapter (iirc).

Some of the books would not work really well to do “beginning/middle/end” for the books because they do not necessarily have that structure.  I think some of them do, some of them are more of kind-of separate episodes that could make more sense to narrate as a separate chapter.

My sons would have had a hard time to narrate the whole book at the time they liked it.  If it works and makes sense for your child I would go for it.  

[8filltheheart]

I agree 100% with SWB on IEW's dress up approach.  There are much better ways to teach students to improve sentence quality.  (I don't use WWE or WWS, so no comment there.)

In terms of narration, I prefer conversations.  Instead of asking my kids to narrate, I simply ask open-ended questions.  My goal is to get them to synthesize information and understand key concepts. It works.