Dear LTED 618 classmates

April 14, 2019 

Dear LTED 618 classmates,

How are you doing today? I’m doing well, but I have been very busy with work, school, and home life lately. Can you believe we are already almost at the end of the semester? It seems like these last few months have flown by!

Tonight, I’m looking forward to giving a genre expert presentation on letter writing. Even though teaching letter writing is not a requirement for teachers, I hope my presentation will open your eyes to the benefits of this form of writing for students of all ages. While my primary mode of letter writing these days is through email communication, I have enjoyed writing traditional letters practically my whole life.

Selfie with a mail truck!

I got my first pen pal in fourth grade through a volunteer pen pal program at my church. Her name was Sharon, we were the same age, and her family was Christian missionaries in Ireland. While I never met Sharon, I loved writing letters to her and learning about her life. She would send me postcards and photos of Ireland, and I would send her little trinkets and other things I thought she would like based on our correspondence. That same year, my elementary school adopted a heavy focus on letter writing. Every classroom was assigned a street name and given a class mailbox. Students were taught to write friendly letters to one another and given time to do so. We even had a “post office,” and would take turns playing the various roles including postmaster, mail clerk, and mail carrier. I remember really enjoying this yearlong project because I liked receiving letters from my friends after I wrote them letters, and it was fun to own the process by working in the “post office.”

Several years later, my pen pal was my cousin Danielle. We would write letters back and forth to each other every summer while she was at her family's cottage in the 1000 islands. I remember how excited I was to receive these letters, and how I became obsessed with printing out fun stationery prints on my home printer and then hand-writing the letters. I still have several of the letters she wrote at home at home, alongside store-bought stationery and envelopes that I use to write the occasional thank you note.

My high school had a mailbox system in every homeroom. Our homeroom teachers would put school communications like cafeteria menus, spirit day schedules, and photo order forms in these mailboxes. My friends and I enjoyed writing notes to each other and leaving them in each other’s mailboxes as well.

As an adult, most of my traditional (aka pen to paper) letter writing is limited to thank you notes or birthday cards. However, I look forward to the day when I can leave notes in my son’s lunchbox for him to read at school just like my mom did when I was a kid.

I hope you enjoy the presentation tonight. I'd love to hear your feedback. If you wish to share, please post a comment here or email me at mshippe0@naz.edu.

Sincerely,

Michelle

Reflections on this assignment

Dear Dr. Jones,

I hope you are doing well. Since I will be presenting on letter writing in class next week, I thought it appropriate to continue to hone my letter writing skills through framing this blog as letter to you.

It’s wild to think that eight months ago I had no concept of how to teach (or develop) reading and writing skills in elementary level students. When we first met, you asked me what grade level I wanted to work with. Since my classes at Nazareth have been geared towards working with elementary students, my eyes have been opened to the possibilities of working with this age group. At this point, I see myself either in an elementary library or a middle school library. I believe there is a level of creative thinking and wonder in these age groups (as well as an excitement for hands-on projects!), that I don’t think I would find at the high school or college level. I also discovered how much I love children’s literature, and reading it means so much more to me now that I can view it from critical lens. I want to thank you for laying the groundwork for my future professional endeavors as I continue down this path.

You’ve asked me to reflect on how keeping a blog this semester helped me reach the student learning outcomes for this course. Looking at these outcomes, I believe my blog has helped me meet them all in different ways. Writing this blog has helped me realize that writing and reading are interconnected processes, as well as the role metacognition plays in reading and writing proficiency (outcomes 4 and 5). While talking in class about a reading is one way to learn, I found that taking the time to write about my takeaways from the readings and how to apply them to my own professional life was highly beneficial. Writing this blog has been my “medium to think,” and reflect on the readings, assignments, and discussions from this course.

My favorite part of this course was learning about the genres (outcome 1)! I loved reading mentor texts as I learned the key elements of each genre and how to teach them. Through this blog, I explored the journal genre, narrative genre, and poetry genre further. I believe my writings on these genres will be a useful resource for me in the future as I introduce these genres to students.

Another big takeaway for me was learning that ANYTHING can be a mentor text, both in print and digital formats. I learned to assess texts by looking for their purpose and form, as well as the elements of author’s craft (outcome 2) or Hicks’ M.A.P.S. criteria for digital texts. While I came into this class with a fairly strong understanding of composition strategies for digital texts (outcome 3) based on my professional work, I didn’t realize that the compositions themselves (ex: video, audio) are mentor texts.

Finally, I made tremendous strides this semester is learning how to help others revise their work, by understanding the role of assessment and evaluation in determining reading and writing proficiency (outcome 6). Prior to this course, I thought evaluating student/peer work meant looking for misspelled words and grammatical errors. Now, I realize that purpose, audience, and form should take first priority when assessing/evaluating student work. The writer’s workshops have helped me hone this skill, and I had the chance to write a little about what I learned on the topic of revising work in a previous post. Since learning about the genres, I can also help look for the hallmarks of the genre in the work. For example, I helped Anna with her argumentative genre piece this week by drawing on what I learned about the structure of arguments/counterarguments from Tompkins.

While this assignment was challenging at times, I’ve never had the opportunity to evaluate academic texts at a critical level on a regular basis like this. I think this was a fitting assignment for this course and I hope to continue using “writing as a medium to think” in the future!

Sincerely,

Michelle Shippers

Bless, Address, & Press No. 1

After looking through my peers’ recent blog posts, I would like to expand on Kristina’s Week 7 blog on narrative writing. Hicks says that a good critique should bless (offer praise), address (ask specific questions about the ideas), and press (ask critical questions to help the writer move forward) (p. 83). I hope to achieve all three for Kristina through my feedback today, as well as add to my own understanding of the elements of story.

1. Bless: I really enjoyed Tompkins’ chapter on narrative writing as well as Kristina’s presentation on teaching the genre, so I was excited to see Kristina wrote about preparing for her presentation in her most recent blog. Since I’ll be doing a presentation on letter writing in several weeks, I was eager to learn how Kristina prepared for her presentation. She did a wonderful job explaining her process, from her own experiences with the genre to her research process (great idea to search The Reading Teacher journals for relevant articles!). She also remembered Hicks’ elements of a good presentation, focusing on the stickiness factor (p. 73). As someone who also may be inclined to read off the slides, I need to keep these elements in mind when designing my own genre presentation.
2. Address: Kristina wrote about her hesitations for teaching the narrative genre, having very few memories of learning to teach narrative writing during her undergraduate. I hope these memories are an exception to what most elementary teachers are teaching now, as I remember learning about story structure several times over when I was in elementary and middle school.
   
   In chapter 8, Tompkins talks about the elements of narrative writing, beginning with plot. I remember learning about the story structure pyramid when I was in school.

   

   Freytag's (story structure) pyramid.
   Retrieved from rookreading.com

   My classmates and I would read a story and then map it out using the pyramid, from exposition (beginning) to climax (middle) and end (resolution/denouement). Later, we learned to write our own stories using the story structure pyramid as a guide to map out the plot. In high school, I remember using the pyramid to map out Shakespeare’s plays to add to my own understanding of the text.
   
   Tompkins’ cites Applebee’s (1980) research that “by the time children begin kindergarten, they’ve already developed a concept of what story is, and these expectations guide them as they respond to stories and tell their own.” (Applebee, cited in Tompkins, pg. 171). Tompkins goes on to say that children as young as two and a half have a concept of story (p. 171), something I notice with my own 2.5 year-old who will eagerly say “The End!” when we finish a story. As a future library media specialist, I’m certain that helping my young readers understand the elements of story would be important. I found these great videos on weareteachers.com that would be great to show my students while we discuss the elements of story!
3. Press : Kristina says that “when students are explicitly taught about the structural elements of narrative writing, they will develop into better writers.” I would like to know her ideas for teaching young students these elements. We got a glimpse into Kristina’s life as a teacher through her genre presentation, and I really enjoyed the character maps to show the outside and inside (F.A.S.T. acronym) of characters. What are some other teaching strategies that she might use for teaching the elements of story/narrative writing with elementary students? I believe that including more examples of ways to teach story in her blog (such as talking about the character maps) would be beneficial to readers like me who are interested in learning more about how to teach story. 

Sources outside class textbooks
Applebee, A.N. (1980). The child’s concept of story: Ages 2 to 17. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wells, K. (2019, March 17). “Genre expert” workshop presentation. Retrieved from https://kristinawells-lted618-spring2019.blogspot.com/2019/03/genre-expert-workshop-presentation.html