Want your students' writing to improve? Encourage drawing as a pre-writing activity.

Miss can I draw? This is a frequently asked question among both Emergent Multilingual students and monolingual students.  With the high pressure of standardized testing, the lack of hours in the day, and a strict curriculum to follow it can be hard to make time for drawing. Drawing however, can be used as an excellent pre-writing activity. Drawing allows students to add details that they may not easy put down in writing. Drawing can help students create a sequence of events that they might struggle to produce when writing. Having the visual representation to look at can improve students' writing by allowing students to add greater details, giving students a visual support, giving students ownership of their creative process, and increasing word count. Here are some links on using drawing as a pre-writing tool.

Here is an example of the notes and illustrations my students did while I did a read-aloud and discussion using El Cucuy! by Joe Hayes (the bottom image is my example from my Writers' Notebook). Tomorrow we will be reading El Cucuy from Heart Shaped Cookies by Daivd Rice and using a venn diagram to compare and contrast the 2 stories.

6th grade students' illustrations and book notes about El Cucuy. I love that he added dialogue (Helpos = Help us)
Illustrations can be a pre-writing tool and also as a way for students to show their understanding of a text.


Link to: Want to Improve your Kids' Writing? Let them Draw.

http://splash.abc.net.au/newsandarticles/blog/-/b/2167489/want-to-improve-your-kids-writing-let-them-draw

Link to: The Influence of Drawing on Third Graders' Writing Performance

http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol38/iss1/2/

My 6th graders are working on personalizing their classroom notebooks.

Students are creating foldables for their interactive notebooks. 

First Days of School

Classroom is almost ready. 

The class Cognate and Synonym Word Wall is ready to be filled.

We will be preparing our interactive notebooks this week. These foldables will hold the class expectations my students decide will help us have a safe and respectful learning environment in our classroom community.

Update 8/20/18

* The post above is from a couple of years ago. After reflecting on how I used these notebooks I feel I would do things differently. Yes, the cut outs were cute and the kids liked them, and it kept them busy the whole class period, BUT what was the objective? What were the kids really learning? Sure, it provided an opportunity for  following directions, but did we ever go back to reread the rules, goals, or expectations? No. We did not. 

If I decide to use interactive notebooks in the future, I plan to read about the proper way to use them and attend professional development training that will help me better understand how to use them in the classroom efficiently. I found the following book at Heinemann.Com and plan  read it in order to be better informed of the proper way to support students through the use of interactive notebooks:

Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners

How to Scaffold Content for Academic Success

By Marcia J Carter, Anita C Hernandez, NMSU, Jeannine D Richison, California Polytechnic State University 

https://www.heinemann.com/products/e02611.aspx

Here is a link to a research review by Ofelia Garcia, Jo Anne, Kleifgen, and Lorraine Falchi on changing the term used to refer to students who are learning to be proficient multilingual students from ESL/ELL/LEP to Emergent Bilinguals or Multilinguals. The terms ESL, ELL, and LEP put a negative emphasize on students' limitations and fail to point out the  the funds of knowledge and multiple literacies these students are bringing to our classrooms.

http://www.equitycampaign.org/i/a/document/6532_Ofelia_ELL__Final.pdf

Tomorrow is the first day of school. In this year's course I plan to focus my instruction on basic structures and vocabulary of the English language through reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Students will work on developing strategies to help them advance their English language acquisition and in becoming partners in their education.
Have a great year!

Here is a great link to a video from Polaris Charter Academy in New York on using an interactive word wall. I love that the teacher, 8th-grade teacher Rich Richardson, is not only checking that the students can define the words, but he is taking it a bit further and encouraging students to think critically by asking them to explain how the terms are connected.

http://eleducation.org/resources/interactive-word-wall#.V7Gtb4sNhHA.mailto