I Love Literacy in the Afternoon

We return to the classroom from lunch at 1:00. The return walk down the stairs is always a little fidgety, the effect of a thirty minute bombardment of non-stop noise.Once we step into our room, there are usually small outbreaks of students propelling into, then falling on top of one another, cuddling in corners, quiet giggling, and an occasional lunchroom crisis to adjudicate after the fact. By the time we're settled and ready to begin Read Aloud, sometimes as much as ten minutes may have passed. Once I open the book of the day and read the title, inevitably someone raises a hand and asks, "May I go to the bathroom?"

This is one of those moments a first grade teacher needs to have (and put to good use) a sense of humor. I admit this question sets my teeth on edge. Each day at the same time I remind 1D students they have 50 minutes of recess and lunchroom to take a bathroom break. I emphasize that once we have returned to the classroom, I like for them to stay put. They're on "my time." Never fear, good readers, of course I send the student with the raised hand off to the bathroom, with the caveat: "Try to return as soon as possible -- you're going to miss the beginning of Read Aloud!" That usually gets them back to the room in less than 2 minutes, and that includes the commute down the hall to the bathroom!

There's a reason our students return to class as quickly as they do -- they love Read Aloud! In November we dreamed daily about Read Aloud Dragons. We thrilled to tales of Saint George slaying the Dragon, Chinese rain and fire dragons, fire-breathing dragons, dragons who possessed many heads, (Hydra) dragons who looked like serpents and lived in the sea (leviathans) -- you name the dragon type and we learned a little bit about it. We talked about the fact that dragons appear in stories from cultures the world over; we discussed why ancient peoples finding large fossil bones and footprints might have imagined that large monsters slithered over the land or flew through the skies. We discussed how myths evolved as people told stories to explain things about their world that they could not understand. We really found a terrific source of dragon lore in Gail Gibbons' Behold...The Dragons! (William Morrow and Co.,publishers, New York, NY, 1988.)

After Read Aloud, we have recently begun a new aspect of Writing where one student chooses to share a recent journal entry with the class. Prior to Read Aloud I ask if any student is willing to share a recentjournal entry with the class. I need to find a willing reader/writer prior to their reading the piece for the simple reason that I will need to get this student's permission to copy his or her journal entry onto a white board for the whole class to see. After the journal entry is copied, the class sits down in front of the white board and the student writer reads it to the class. After reading, he or she may take four student comments or compliments about the piece. These days we're working on making specific references to the writer's content; for example, a student listening to the piece might comment, "I really liked the way you read the story!" which, although a pleasant and reassuring compliment, has nothing to do with the student's writing. We have discouraged comments about how someone reads because we want to focus on what the writing is about.

A better comment, we're learning, focuses on something about the writing that is worth remembering. We're looking to spotlight words and ideas that help us to see what the author is writing about. For example, the other day Meghan wrote about buying a fairy book. In her piece she told us that over the weekend she bought a book about Pearl the Winter Fairy at a bookstore with her mother, her father and her brother. In her journal she said she was looking forward to buying another fairy book soon. When we made comments about Meghan's entry, students noted that she had included details about who went with her, what she bought and when she made her purchase. Someone said they liked that Meghan told us the name of the book she bought. We are trying to encourage our student authors to include information that answer the "5Ws and an H" questions (for the uninitiated: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How questions).

Taking comments in the form of feedback turns out to be the easy part. Sharing writing also means that the whole class will examine and edit your writing for spelling and punctuation -- which is the reason I wrote the journal entry down on the white board. After listening to Meghan's piece about purchasing her fairy book, we looked really closely at her spelling and her punctuation. She made a couple of spelling errors (e.g., we added an "a" to "Perl" to become "Pearl"; we added an "e" to "brothr". Meghan had also forgotten to capitalize the first word in one of her sentences and forgot to capitalize Pearl's name.

We read through the piece, word by word and made corrections. The students have learned that we will look for spelling and capitalization errors and make corrections on the board in a different color. They also know that we're going to point out the work that was done correctly. We will mention when a student followed the rules correctly. In Meghan's case, she remembered how to spell all but one or two words, and she remembered to use the rules of punctuation and capitalization correctly in all but two instances. I want the students to know that when you share your work, you trust that your peers will value your work and your effort. It is a very brave thing they do when they show their classmates their writing. In effect they proclaim to everyone in the class, "I'm proud of my work and want to share it with you. I'm prepared for you to find a mistake or two, because we're going to learn together by looking carefully at my work!"

At the end of our sharing session, we give the student author a huge celebratory round of applause. Everyone knows it can be challenging to take a chance that they may have made a mistake. If I have done my job well in preparing the students in our class to take risks, they will know that because they have shared their work with their peers, everyone in the class will be better writers.

After our sharing session, we adjourn to our seats where we write for one-half hour to forty minutes. In the next few weeks, we'll move toward publishing our best entries. Some of our students will write about facts, some will write about personal experiences, some will retell favorite stories. Look for more stories about 1D writers in coming entries.