Ch7 Routman

My Master Teacher in the third grade uses a lot of Routman’s ideas. She is a fan of “Writer’s Workshop” and she wants the students to be surrounded by writing every day. She sets aside 30 minutes of silent reading a day, and she emphasizes the need to find books that fit their learning level and to try out many different genres before deciding that “Mystery Novels are not for you.”

One of the neatest methods she uses is her writing prompts. She has a writing workshop booklet (can’t for the life of me remember the title) and writes a prompt from it on the board. These aren’t cheesy prompts, one of my favorites is “You have just arrived in Seattle, at night. The buildings all have their lights on, but they are all empty. Write a story telling me what happened!” This writing prompt struck a chord with some kids who hadn’t given much thought to writing. One student in particular began writing page after page of “Almost-zombie” apocalypse material. He had gotten to chapter 3 by the end of the day. He showed me his favorite parts of his story, and I had asked him to go further. “You say you jumped into a car to hide from the scary man. In my head I picture a box on wheels. Can you use your words to paint me a picture of this car, what color is it, and what brand is it?” He responded with, “I can use any car I want?” I said “sure, just give me details so I can picture it, too!”

She does a document camera writing demonstration. She asks the class for examples of what she could write next. She purposefully spells things wrong or forgets capitalization when she covers editing. She has even cut and pasted sentences around a paper. She likes to leave little things wrong on the board or the paper just to see if the kids catch it. If it isn’t caught, then during the discussion she will say something along the lines of “Oh, look at that, I spelled that word totally wrong, I will use my editing notation to fix it. Can anyone tell me how it should be fixed?” That acknowledgment of doing it wrong and asking for help seems to work for the kids, but I haven’t noticed if the kids are asking each other for help yet.

The one step that I have not seen her do in the classroom is the reading share and classroom celebration step. She has praised a few writers in front of the class, for having amazing story ideas, or excitement and wonder. But, the students don’t seem to have the opportunity to share with the class to generate their own praise and recognition as writers. I look forward to talking with my Master Teacher about that step and to see if it can be used in the classroom.