Writing in my First Grade Classroom

It was not really until this semester that I began to see writing instruction in my first grade classroom. Previously writing only focused on practicing handwriting and the different letters of the alphabet, but now as students have progressed my CT has moved into writing sentences. She began scaffolding writing by just having students practice writing words, then putting words together into sentences, then reinforcing capital letters at the beginning and a punctuation mark at the end. Slowly students are being asked to write more than one sentence and oftentimes these sentences are related—in this way, they are moving towards writing paragraphs. As for instruction, I haven’t necessarily seen direct instruction for sentences because I am only there once a week. But my CT does give them a lot of practice and she has even begun working with them on making rough drafts, then editing these rough drafts into a “final copy”. This is obviously less in-depth than the writing process discussed in Thompson but it is getting them more used to the idea of fixing and changing their writing so that when they start to learn the five steps of the writing process it will not be so strange for them. I think this scaffolding is really working with the students in my classroom and I feel like their writing abilities have definitely improved over the course of the semester.

One thing that I do not feel is working well in my classroom is issues with spelling. The students in my classroom get so caught up on spelling that they fail to produce any writing. I think my CT could implement or model more independence-building strategies. For example, she could reinforce to students to use the word wall when they are writing. In addition, she could model how to sound out words and even show the students that correct spelling is less important than getting our ideas out onto the paper (so modeling making mistakes in her own writing in front of the classroom). One thing I have never seen her do is use the overhead to demonstrate writing with her students. I am curious whether or not she does this when we aren’t there. However, I do think that most of the time spent on writing is teacher-directed and I feel that perhaps she should start moving into more student-directed writing (having them pick their own topic and work more on brainstorming). The students would really benefit from getting some practice with being independent learners.