Memorandum Reflection

The memorandum was an interesting assignment, I felt like I was summarizing all of the articles that I read. However, I learned a lot by reading and rereading and then trying to put my findings into my own words. I really liked the idea of encouraging a lot of outside reading with students of all ages. Literacy in reading is extremely important and I understand how it can impact literacy in writing. I love to read and after this assignment I can see why I also like to write. I believe that reading a lot helps students develop more vocabulary and they learn how to use it in proper context. Another point I really liked was that writing should take place as often as possible, it made me think of our blogs. Even though they are not papers or essays they keep us thinking, writing and expressing!

The Importance of Correctness

This seems like a really good guide for writing papers and actually seems like something I might use in the future. When I was in High School (just kidding) :-), the English teachers put together a reading and writing resource handbook that had a lot of this same information in it but it only focused on teaching how to write MLA style papers. This is full or a lot more information and it will be useful for writing papers using other styles. I really liked; "A word about Correctness" on page two because I felt that it related to the set of articles I read for the Inquiry into Writing project. I think it is important to worry about errors after you have written your papers because otherwise you get distracted while you are writing. It is just sometimes hard to remember to go back and proof your work, especially when you are in a hurry. Correctness really does matter when someone is reading your piece. I know that if I am reading somebodies paper and there are a lot of errors I tend to get bored with what I am reading or irritated because I feel like some of the mistakes are aviodalbe if people payed better attention or went back and proof read.

Learning From Research

It has been so long since we had to write a blog!
I read set 4 for our Inquiry into writing project, and found the articles pretty interesting. There was a lot of useful information that I will hopefully remember to implement in my own classroom someday. I especially liked the idea that the classroom is a community and all of the members of the class are real players (Co-Authoring...Larson and Maier). I feel that the idea of community was a constant theme in the four articles and that all of the teachers who were involved in the studies found it important for the students to communicate with the class in a formal tone and environment as well as an informal tone and environment. The teachers felt that by allowing the students to know a lot about their peers there was more room for creativity and a more open classroom. In the same article I mentioned above, the teacher; Maryrita Maier taught first grade and she and her class had lunch family style in their classroom everyday. This definitely changed the classroom from a formal learning environment to a much more informal one.
The articles also mentioned how important fluency is in both reading and writing. A point that I found particularly interesting was; In order to become a writer you have to read!. This was from the last article in the set but it really summed up a lot of the ideas from the previous articles because all of the teachers put a tremendous amount of influence on both subject and tried to devote about two hours a day to the study of Reading and writing, even incorporating writing in other subjects. As long as students are writing they are learning to appreciate writing and their own work which will eventually help them figure out exactly what they want to write about!