all right so welcome back everyone we're so excited to have you with us again for this wonderful book study series the writing rope with Joe and sadito the author we're so honored to have her here and to have you here thank you so much for being here after what I'm sure has been a very busy day and here you are learning with us again thank you so very very much uh my name is Dr Pam Kastner I have the honor of serving as Patton State lead for literacy and joining from the patent literacy team this evening is Dr Stacy cherny our central region lead literacy lead show wave to you and Maggie surprise Maggie you have to do your last name again do that for me Maggie I'm terrible with that that's okay it's Maggie surplowski I'm excited to be here with you this evening thank you Maggie and Nicole Copco from the central office too so uh thank you Nicole as well for being here we're very excited to start chapters three and four with you this evening Jones having a little bit of a technical challenge that we've been working around but um she can um you can hear her and we can communicate with her we figured that out so we are going to turn it over to her I'm going to put it in the chat so she knows to start um and she'll get started thanks again for being here oh one thing before we do start I'm so sorry Joan um make sure that you have your actual name in uh your screen if you want at 48 we can't we don't know who you are if it says like Mary's iPhone so it's very important that you have your actual name in the screen and all you have to do is go up to the corner the right hand corner and the three little dots if you click on that you can rename yourself we'll be putting the padlet link in throughout the evening and with that I'm going to turn it over to Stacy cherny who's going to share Jones bio and then Joan will start good evening sorry give me a thumbs up when you guys are ready for me to join in all right okay John we're gonna we're gonna introduce you officially and give your bio so everyone can hear all about you uh prior to you starting this evening um Joan sedita is the founder of keys to literacy A literacy professional development organization Joan has been in the literacy field for over 40 years as a teacher administrator and teacher trainer she has authored multiple literacy professional development programs including the key comprehension routine the key vocabulary routine keys to beginning reading keys to content writing keys to early writing understanding dyslexia and Adolescent literacy reading beginning in 1975 she worked for 23 years at the landmarks School a Pioneer in the development of literacy intervention programs as a teacher principal and director of the Outreach teacher training program at Landmark Joan developed expertise methods and instructional programs that address the literacy needs of students in grades K through 12. Joan was one of the three lead trainers in Massachusetts for the reading first program and was a letters author and trainer Joan received her Masters in Reading from Harvard University and her bachelor's from Boston College and now I present to you Joan sedida all right I think you're ready for me right we are ready all right great thank you well welcome everybody and looks like we have very similar numbers to maybe a little less than last week I don't know if all of you who are on tonight um were here last week or not uh but let me just a couple of introductory things we are on the second of our five series and thank you again big thanks to everyone at batan for giving me this opportunity to do this book study with you um we're basically doing two chapters at a time for each session last time we covered the introduction to the writing rope framework and chapter two which is about what do we know about effective writing instruction and you know within those topics just by way of a quick little summary um you know we reviewed what were the major pieces to the writing rope and tonight uh we're gonna drill down on two of them the transcription Strand and the writing craft strand but on our first evening I quickly went through the other pieces I might probably maybe on the next time I show the the rope in the coming slide I might just do a really quick three-minute overview again um we also talked a lot about the important role that teachers of any subject can play especially in grades five and up where oftentimes students have two or as many as five different teachers and part of what we we um addressed was and a lot of this is connected to the critical thinking strands of the writing rope right and the text structure that um a teacher of science or of history or or even English where you're focusing in on a certain kind of piece of literature right that in many respects you're the better person to show students how to write about what they're learning to write about their subject right because it's sometimes especially by the time you get up into the you know Upper Middle grades and Beyond it's often referred to as disciplinary reading or disciplinary writing um so that was an important point that we made last time um I also while we did that identified three major types of writing that can happen to support content learning uh we talked a little bit about quick rights and then um sort of medium kinds of Rights content writing tasks things like summarizing which we'll get into in one of our later meetings and then also the more detailed kinds of um uh more longer kinds of research kinds of writing tasks we uh in chapter two and we were going over the the research about this I called your attention to several major reports that um reported on major meta-analyzes of the research related to writing uh you can go back in and a lot of that is summarized in the second chapter um we also reviewed some major teaching principles including the iwiu gradual release we talked a lot about Mentor models which I'm going to address again tonight when we especially when we talk about writing craft so that's just a quick little review of what we did on the last meeting and um a couple of other introductory things I showed this slide or a version of it the first night and I just wanted to call everyone's attention to if you do have the book um several pages in in the very beginning and I'll just hold this up to my camera you'll see that the the book has a spot with a code and I've put the code on the slide here that allows you to go to the Brooks publishing website that has they call it the download Hub it's not just my book they have stuff from other other of their Publications um like I know for example Nancy Hennessey's book about comprehension they have some great stuff from her book but um all of the or most of the templates and graphic organizers and things that are in the writing World Book they have put together in an electronic format so you can download them and use them with your students one thing I do want to point out is the code as you see it that second letter so it's a small X and that second letter is an l a lowercase L not a capital I I know some folks had some difficulty uh dropping that in the other thing that I have on here is a code that Brooks has given to folks who are participating in this book study it is only good until the end of December if you decide to purchase the book from Brooks um you go to their website it will give you 10 off plus free shipping I know last weekend we had a few folks in the chat saying they were having a hard time using the code they did check it it is viable uh one thing they suggested is that when you go to check out there is a drop down menu where you would put about codes so make sure that you're looking for that um all right so we're basically going to cover chapters three and four chapter three is about transcription skills and I'm showing once again the the beautiful colored version of the the writing rope that the uh graphic designers at at Brooks put together for this book and um so while we have the whole thing up in front of us I I just want to really quickly say a few words about the big picture for the writing rope for those of you who might have missed it and I think it's such an important big picture couple of points that I want to make that even if you heard me with say this last week I think it's worth repeating um so this is meant as a framework right for educators teachers literacy people even administrators to think about if we're teaching writing writing has multiple components to it just like reading does but unfortunately many teachers don't don't know what those components might be and so that's why I put this together that was my main reason to be able to enable an educator to say all right look I can tell you what the major components of reading are then I can now tell you what the major components are our writing are and that enables you to when you're thinking about your daily lesson plans your long-term lesson plans if you're developing a curriculum around writing instruction if you're thinking about purchasing a writing program it gives you a framework to be able to say are all the pieces there are we covering all the major areas um or components that will help it grow our students running writing um I won't get into a lot of the detail about each piece of the Rope but on this slide you can see down the left column where I put a lot of sub components or sub categories of skills and strategies and and um you know techniques that that our students need to learn so um the first I also just want to remind us that the top one the critical thinking that has to do with all the skills and strategies associated with writing about what we're learning and writing to text note taking summarizing all those things that falls under there as well as the stages in the writing process that one along with text structure which happens at lots of different levels right these are the two that I truly believe every content teacher can and must play a role in in helping for instruction um the English teachers can't do it alone and as I said before you can show kids how to apply this to your particular subject area so especially the text structure because you're using text in your subject areas maybe it's a chapter in your textbook or an article or something on on the web if you take a moment and this gets us a little bit into writing craft right if you take a moment to use the text that students are reading as a um as a sample of how text can be structured right then you can flip it so that if you just talked about this is an excellent example of a descriptive writing piece or a narrative piece or this is a great way that this this text that we're reading writes an introduction for you now we can flip it so that the students begin to emulate that in their own writing so I really think the critical thinking in the text structure strand are the two in particular that all content teachers can play a role in and I also still feel that the syntax strand as well we're going to be getting into that I think it's the next sometime in the next one or two sessions and I think content teachers can play a role with that so um the two that we're focusing on tonight I think for the most part tend to be the purview of your English language arts or your English or your writing teachers more so than the other three strands so let's delve a little bit more into transcription which is at the bottom um I think I mentioned this to you last week we know that explicit instruction in both transcription skills which you see listed on the left side and the higher level more critical thinking composing skills students need explicit instruction in both of these right now transcription think about the word that's embedded in that right transcribe so transcription thing skills are things like spelling so that you can make sure you're representing the words you want people to read in a way that they can read them so you're transcribing the spoken word using the graphemes that represent the Sounds in the word but it's also either handwriting and or keyboarding so how do you get what you want to say out on the paper um you can be if you're using word processing you need to have pretty fluent handwriting skills I'm sorry keyboarding skills if you're handwriting if it's going to be a on paper you need to have either print or cursive but you need to be somewhat fluent in that um you know the research tells us Graham points this out and several of his research articles that I refer to in the book that you know for students who leave the end of third or throughout fourth grade if they leave those grades and they're not fluent with their spelling and their handwriting or keyboarding what happens is they have to put considerable effort right into transcribing the words on the page and that takes away from the higher level composing and critical thinking skills that they need um uh on the right side you've got the composing skills this is everything from the other strands in the Rope generating your ideas organizing them using the stages of The Writing Practice the language you have to express your um ideas awareness of tap uh uh which is Task audience and purpose which we're going to get into a little more tonight and then of course that integration of comprehension and writing skills at the same time um one of the things and oh just as a reminder for those that you of you who might not have tuned in last time the page numbers on the bottom of the slides refer to the page numbers in the writing rope book so if you want to if you have your books and turn to those pages while we're talking about them um or just refer to them later so what I did is grab some quote that I have I have here from this is coming from Pages 24 to 25 about spelling so you can read along with me research findings emphasize the importance of spelling for overall writing quality for students in the early grades moats pointed out that students with spelling difficulty May restrict what they write to words they can spell with as Louisa says inevitable loss of verbal power or they may lose track of their thoughts when they get stuck trying to spell a word research has also found that explicit spell instruction is more than is more effective than informal instruction um and that's why I suggested last time and I will emphasize it again that I believe the best place to be teaching spelling is during a phonics lesson where we combine the decoding with the encoding they're like the yin and yang right as students are learning the the way that we represent spoken sounds in a word that helps teach them the options they have for graphemes when actually spelling words phonics instruction provided in the primary grades helps children use the alphabetic principle to learn how the 26 letters in the English alphabet are used to represent the 44 sounds in the English language and then of course Advanced word study instruction is going to also address how we read and spell multi multi-syllable words so you know as we're teaching students the concept of SWA that happens in unaccented syllables in multi-syllable words you know that's important so that when they're trying to write these long longer words they recognize that that that sound they say here that's kind of muffled well it could be represented by lots of different vowels it's also really important for students to have been taught spelling principles especially for adding endings to words um and you know one last thing that I really want to emphasize here is that and I bet those of you who work with older struggling writers who also are struggling readers you see this all the time they often especially as they get older are really hesitant to use some longer words in their writing even though the words are beautiful words and they like they they capture what they want to say and it it you know would Engage The Reader more they will skip those words and instead put in a single syllable word or two syllable word because they know that they can spell it so that embarrassment that comes along when we're writing and people are seeing our writing is all tied in with this um in this chapter what I do uh is look it wasn't designed as a book to teach people how to teach spelling right um nor is it meant to focus on in depth on Phonics but one of the things that I did do is include a phonic scope and sequence that can be used for both decoding and encoding so those of you have the book if you can turn to pages 26 to 28 that's where you'll see this um scope and sequence for those of you who maybe have not purchased the book that's fine um but I also just wanted to point out that this scope and sequence it's a generic one that I put together several years ago and it is uh you can download it for free from one of my blog posts from a year or two ago so at the ending slide I think I'll have a I have a link to my blog post there something I write once a month I take a topic I go into it in depth and um so you you can you know go to the site where my all my monthly blogs are and there's one about a phonics scope and sequence and you can download this there um you know we know that there are lots of challenges with spelling English right it's much easier to decode words than to encode them and as I mentioned especially crazy things like the schwa sound right um but really A phonics instruction it really needs to be also about the English orthography so you know I have a quick question to pose out for you to reflect on and I know with a large group like this sometimes people aren't don't feel comfortable you know typing in a chat but I would just love to hear what you say about this question I'm posing here um are a phonic scope and sequence and spelling rules used to teach phonics for decoding and spelling in your school or District um it'd be great drop it in a chat you know yes no partially is it something you wish you'd see more uh I think it would be helpful for us to all kind of get a sense of for those of you listening in is there a phonic scope and sequence either a generic one like the one that's in the writing rope book here or um perhaps one that comes with a phonics program or a core reading that program that you're using um and basically you know if you think about what should be covered if we're going to teach family that's why I put this scope and sequence in here really to say let's not forget any of these uh orthographic and um phoning graphing connections um as kids move Beyond third and fourth grade so the other thing that I do in this chapter is talk a little bit about handwriting um if you again turn to Pages 29 it begins there and on through 32. um I addressed some of the issues that often come up no you've gotta you see them listed here right so why do students need handwriting instruction what do we know from the research what benefits are there for that and there are quite a few right um we I also addressed the issue of print versus cursive and point out that even the leading researchers in our field have not come to a consensus about is it better to just teach print and then in around third grade when we typically used to start teaching cursive should we not do that and instead do keyboarding um you know should we get kids into cursive writing faster than print it's also called manuscript I haven't decided on you know I don't have the definitive answers and neither does the research but what I do want you to know is we do know that it is worth teaching kids handwriting and again this can begin as early as kindergarten and first grade as we start teaching students the letters and letter sound correspondences that is the perfect time to have them practicing being able to write those upper and lower case letters so um the other thing that I do in this chapter this begins around page 31 is all right what kinds of things should we be teaching around handwriting in the early years um so it includes things like really basic but pencil grasp right letter formation including teaching strokes and then several things that are associated with legibility um and it's really I think an important part of print concepts when we think about writing not reading but writing and that is having even our youngest kids recognize that you have a lot to say and first you're going to say it and then through the drawings that you make before you're able to write words but once you can start writing words and then phrases and then sentences we have to be aware of who's reading our writing not only from what we want them to understand from our ideas right but we also want to make it as easy for that person to be able to read our writing so making sure we have enough space between our words right making sure that our our letters stay sort of consistent and so that's what the importance of legibility is um all right so for those of you that are just joining us tonight this is a reminder that um that little icon you see with the Double C that that's a visual a graphic that the Brooks folks put into various places in the book where I wanted people to stop and reflect on what they were reading and learning in the book and then um make a connection to their actual teaching right because that's that should be the ultimate goal of a book like this um is how do we move the needle to enable teachers to not only be aware of the research but understand how do you make that connection to to what you're teaching so uh in these book studies what I've decided to do is in a couple of places bring in the questions or tasks that are in the connect to the classroom so these are the ones that I put in for this chapter uh first was identify students who have difficulty with writing do you think part of what contributes to their writing difficulty is a lack of fluent spelling or handwriting keyboarding um okay just one second if someone from patan could give me a call because you look like you're Frozen and I'm not sure if anybody is hearing me can somebody get in touch with me I can hear you you can hear me give me a nod yes yes yeah we can hear you okay all right great thank you um so you know do you think part of what's contributing to the students who have difficulty um how much of it is this lack of fluent spelling or handwriting and keyboarding um the last question oh looks like there's a spelling error there we can take the E off the how how are spelling and handwriting and keyboarding taught in your school so um again if anybody feels comfortable in the chat typing in their responses here would love to hear it and the takeaway from this is that while the foundations for most of this should be taught prior to fourth grade if students don't have these in at a fluent level we want to make sure that um that we provide some supplemental instruction and intervention so that um so that people so that these students have uh have the fluent ability to spout and handwrite all right so now let's uh look at chapter four this focused on the green level here by the way people have asked me did I pick the colors for some reason and the answer is no the graphic designers at Brooks pick the colors uh my original wasn't black and white so um so let's look at the green strand writing craft uh right so what is it that that falls under right and craft um so it's things like certainly things like word choice right um and awareness of task audience and purpose but then a whole host of what are called literary devices and we'll get into all those in just a minute so let's let's focus a little bit more on task audience and purpose sometimes referred to as tap this these three things combined are really important because if you're aware of them as a writer it should be influencing a lot of decisions that you have to make during the writing process it's going to influence decisions about um the words that you use about the text structure you choose um you know whether you decide to bring in certain literary devices which we'll get to in a minute right it also affects the tone of what you have to say so it it really should drive a lot of decision making but many of our students especially the ones who struggle unfortunately these kids don't think about this they're just focused on getting stuff down on the paper most of the time they think the only person who's ever going to read it is their teacher and we want to get away from that right and one of the things that we talked about last in the last session that's in the beginning of the book is what are these teaching principles is that when possible if we can assign writing tasks that have authentic audiences that's going to be much more helpful and I'm going to show you some examples of that in just a few slides so task audience purpose now in the book we have uh oh I don't have the page number on there so let me just look it up for you but we have one of the handouts and again this is available at the Brooks for download as well uh but it's called it's it's a series of questions that you can use to um either ask your kids or keep them in front of them right so that they can ask themselves questions that are going to get them to think about task audience and purpose so this is uh the smaller version of this is on page 35 and there's a full page uh example of it in the appendix of the book or you could download this now if you are feeling that uh three questions for each of these is too overwhelming for some of your students at first then just pick one just pick one question from each category and then gradually as your students become more aware of tap then you can put all three questions in front of you in front of them but as you can see it's really getting to think about under task what is my assignment what am I supposed to do a lot of times kids lose track of that um you know where this becomes also really important is on high-stakes State assessments where students are often asked to do a task such as the following they're given sometimes um you know maybe one to three different sources one of them might even be a video right the others are text and they're asked a very specific prompt and what they're supposed to do is go to the sources find only the relevant information or evidence that answers that prompt pull it out and then write about it in their response now we're going to get into that a lot more in our last meeting when we talk about writing from sources but think about how many of your students they start looking at the the sources and they completely lose track of the task and so what happens they go back and they just start writing about what they remember and they're not truly answering the question or the prompt so it really becomes important in in a in a high stakes writing situation what is it that I'm being asked to do am I I asked to summarize am I asked to retell everything I remember am I asked to write a description or am I supposed to compare and contrast and then finally what form should my writing take under audience who is the audience and it could be a real authentic audience or not meaning sometimes we can assign students a task to write for a certain person or group of people in mind that we know might never even read our response right so I'll give you an example from a Content classroom a teacher was going to have students write some an informational piece about Napoleon Bonaparte but after doing our training the the teacher said I changed it up and I said I asked them to write a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to the subjects that he ruled over right to make the case for why he was a good ruler and why they should support him now that's an example of the student is thinking about this really authentic audience right the people who lived in France um they're they're they're dead they're not alive so they're never going to actually read the piece but it's that act of feeling like you're writing for something for a real person um I can't remember the exact quote not now but you know John Steinbeck once wrote something about this issue of audience and if I can paraphrase it uh he said I like to think about even just one real person that I'm writing to and I might not know that person but the fact that I'm thinking about them when I'm writing affects my writing and that's what what this this piece here is all about and so the more authentic we can make the audiences better and then the student is answering that question well who will actually read my writing piece one of the things that I share with you later in the book is something called a wag or a writing assignment guide It's a tool that teachers use to plan a writing task and it has sections in it to sort of remind the teacher of lots of things to be aware of one of the sections in the wag is what is the audience so the teacher is actually saying to the students who might read their plate their piece the other thing that's tied to this is if we bring in another one of the teaching principles that we talked about last time which is providing opportunities for students to work collaboratively with their peers this is where if you have a writing assignment and you use the wag and you say part of what I'm going to do in in supporting you in scaffolding this is I'm going to give you opportunities at the thinking stage to brainstorm with a peer or peers about what what you want to say I'm going to give you maybe a collaborative opportunity to have someone review your first draft well now when you're writing about who the audience is it's not just the direct audience for the writing piece but you're reminding students that some of their class peers are going to be reading this and then finally purpose you know what is the purpose is it to and this by the way gets tied into something else we talked about last week right the three main types of writing um your opinion or argument informational or narrative so that's in many respects the very first question that students need to ask them once they know what the task is and who the audience is they have to say so what is my purpose is my purpose to tell a story recount something if that's the case I'm going to use narrative is my purpose to make a point or to convince somebody of something well then then I'm going to use opinion or argument and is my purpose to inform then I need to use information so um that's tap and I guess a question to ask all of you is do you think these questions could be helpful to pose to your students if so please download the template use it with them modify it make a poster out of it you know whatever aspect of it you think would be helpful um so on this slide I've grabbed a couple of other quotes from this chapter in the book on page 34. writing for different purposes often means writing for different audiences to help understand the role of audience in writing it's important to design writing activities that naturally lend themselves to different audiences otherwise students May view writing in school as only writing for their teacher and so have students do things like pretend they're writing a blog post for a famous blogger right uh pretend that they are writing something to a team magazine that they follow right or um that they're writing a letter to anybody in their Community it could be family members it could be politicians it could be people in school um you know the thing that so many teachers do right like the fifth grade students write a letter to the fourth grade students that are going to be coming up into the classroom next year um students should learn to adjust their tone in word choice to better convey their meaning and suit Their audience to develop this skill students might write about the same topic for different audiences so that's an interesting kind of task right especially if it's a shorter maybe it's a quick right task so you might say to students all right the first time I want you to write this it's going to be with the school principle in mind the second time that you're going to write this I want you to write it thinking about a peer student in mind so having them write the same thing but for two different audiences really highlights for them the decisions that they get to make right about how they're going to say this and what they're going to write we also know that um the the research shows over and over again that students will be more motivated and engaged if they are able to keep in mind an authentic audience so um this is something it I don't have this list in in the the writing book book uh this list comes from another book that I wrote prior that I I drew a lot of a lot of Concepts from and that's my book called keys to content writing it's it's tied to some professional development that we do so here's examples again of possible authentic audiences members of the community organizations um Boy Scouts Girl Scouts members of your soccer team right businesses and corporations and I'm going to show you some great examples of how kids got feedback by writing to big businesses that they never thought they would hear from uh politicians younger older students I mentioned family members peers um so just to give you some ideas about what we mean for authentic audiences um so with this slide in the next couple I'm going to show you some examples of just how how when kids get to write to real audiences how powerful it can be right how how it gets them to understand how transformative writing can be so this is a a little visual here I don't know maybe some of you have ever have actually heard of this young woman her name is uh Martha Payne and um she several years back she's from Britain uh uh and she started writing a Blog where she described the lunches the horrible lunches that she had at her school and at first just a few other people in the school started following it and I I've given you actually one of one of her blog posts you can see um the pizza in the first picture was all right but I've enjoyed one more croquette that's certainly an English person speaking that right um so she started writing this blog well the interesting thing she called it never seconds and what happened was after a while the folks that ran the school didn't like that she was writing so negatively and so they tried to shut her blog down and oh no it was Scotland there we go sorry and they tried to shut her blog down and what happened was it kind of caught the interest of a lot of very famous bloggers and they picked up her cause and before you know it she became a um quote kind of world a world phenom so um I don't know if you're familiar with chef Jamie Oliver but he had a massive following for his in his Twitter and he took up her called you can see one of his tweets stay strong Martha um you know retweet this to show uh to show your support so I just want you to to think about oh you could share this to students about the power that this girl felt in being able to write just some simple things about her school lunches um this is another example from from our content writing training uh this is you can see it's from a student who wrote Steph Curry uh if you follow basketball you know Steph Curry is a very well-known basketball star and as you can say see Riley wrote to Steph um complaining that his new line of clothing sports car clothing did not include stuff for girls and she was pretty upset about that um and so she wrote Steph probably not thinking in a million years she'd get a response but I want you to look on the right and see the response that she actually got um and this is one that actually just came up in the news not too long ago uh so this was a four-year-old who obviously loves Entenmann's little bites but he uh was upset and felt that they should add one more to the pack that just weren't enough in there and so I want you to see now he was too young to write this himself so he dictated his mom said we're gonna write a letter to the entenman's company and um she wrote it for him you can see his signature at that point it's just an X now here's the amazing thing is I want you to look at the letter that um he got back we were so delighted to hear how much Xander loves Little Bites etc etc and the really cool thing is they then sent him a box of little bites they did not actually change the number in there but um so my point with all this is I want you to be thinking especially about the authentic audience part of tap right like the more we can make writing real for kids and connected to their daily lives and the more opportunities we can give them to feel like oh my gosh I can actually make a difference with my writing the better so the connect to the classroom questions um for this are do you explicitly teach students about tap and how often do you assign writing tasks that have authentic audiences a little bit more about writer's craft we talked about this last time and I actually showed you some examples maybe if I have a minute or two of time I might go back to some of those slides but um it's often referred to as writer's moves um and the Art of writing right so it's anything that a writer does on purpose to make writing um look or sound a certain way right and the writer is going to be making these decisions which are affected by tap about the tone and the voice you want to use in your writing the word choice that you you make um how you're going to change it to meet the needs of an authentic audience and and even how you're going to organize your piece right so elements of writing craft include the following and in the book I get in a little bit more detail about this what each of these are uh especially narrative point of view what is first person second third person right um But it includes first and foremost what's often referred to as writer's voice right that's the you the writer's Unique Style and let's highlight this word emotion and personality that the writer wants to get across in their writing to either represent themselves or let's say they're writing about characters in a narrative to represent how the characters are feeling right it's sometimes referred to as writing from the heart or doing something with your writing to make the reader feel some emotion um think about how movies do that if you cry at the movies right well we could do that through our writing as well and how is writer's voice captured it's achieved through the choice of language that we use to describe the action or the setting or the use of dialogue especially in narrative um uh word choice we we've said this before but it's purposeful decisions we make about what vocabulary am I going to make and where am I going to place those words can I use descriptive and colorful language and very precise words and think about how if I have a spelling problem how that might impair my my willingness to use some of these really important words and then the literary devices which in the book I take each one of these and give you um you know a lot more detail about what they are there are many many more literacy devices than group one of that here uh certainly when you when you get up into the high school levels I mean there are hundreds of them but what I've tried to do in the writing rope book is identify for you the most common and so again in the book this is in figure 4.5 which is on page 40. um I give you some you know information about what what each of these are and now you know you're not going to expect a fourth grader to do a flashback or to do foreshadowing right but they might use Hyperbole and they're definitely going to use imagery and maybe sensory details and certainly dialogue and figurative language can be used across any grades um so I mentioned earlier that last time we delved a little bit more into Mentor text one of the things that I given in the book is a tool this chart that you can see here for when we take an element in Mentor text we want to give kids a couple of examples first of all and so the way this chart is set up there's space for you down the first left column to list what the three examples of the mentor text are going to be then we've got space to capture what did we notice about this piece and then to finally answer that question why did the author use it why did they use that technique or that choice of words or that particular literary element so bear with me what I'm going to do is go back to some examples that I gave you in I don't mean to make you seasick here all right here we go so some examples that I shared with you last week of Mentor text this was the example I shared that could be used with children as young as first grade second grade so you see three examples of Mentor text and all three of them are examples of a particular technique writer's technique can you guess or tell me what's the technique that you see what what is happening in all three of these what what what's being done and the answer is um they are using speech bubbles that's the first the big one but the second is in a couple of them I want you to look at how they took certain words and um did something visually with them so up in the top right the word cat and wet you see how they made it bigger and blue and red or look in the bottom left where they added the word so much stuff to learn so that's kind of a secondary thing that's going on here but the big one is the speech bubbles so if we were to think about that chart that I just shared with you the teacher would in preparation list these three sources right then together with the students they would discuss and talk about what was similar in them what was the technique and then maybe ask and answer the question why did they do it but then the next most important thing is you then want the students to try it themselves so you would say to them all right let's take one of your pictures that you drew and you're you're telling a story about these two characters that you've drawn in your drawing what do you want them to say to each other and how can we do this technique that these published authors did now the second example I gave you last time was a non-fiction lead and uh let me just jump to it so I gave you two Mentor text examples they're both examples of an introduction to an informational piece they both are writing about the same subject and that's high school dropout but look at the difference between sample one and Sample two and let me just go back so what we're focusing on here in the mentor text is non-fiction leads or hooks there are several many but I've only focused on three in the slide so one trick or hook you can use is to use a quote and these are all designed to like get the leader hook hook the reader in you could use a quote you could pose a question to the reader you could also present fascinating facts and so I would share with students too maybe even a third and we did this last week which is the technique being used in example one and the answer is they used a quote and what was the technique in example two they used presenting fascinating facts or details and so once we're done with the mentor examples and we analyze them and we use think aloud with the students we then say and why did they do that what was the value of that next step is now you emulate it so I want you to take an introduction that you wrote to your most recent informational piece and I want you to use either a quote pose a question or present some fascinating facts so um again last time we went through that example as I was introducing the concept of Mentor text to you but um I think it was helpful especially for those of you who are were not here last time uh to see that all right so with that we have about I have about eight minutes left so I'm gonna put up this slide to give you the link to the literacy lines blog that I mentioned uh also in addition to everything that's in this book that Brooks has published I have a very large collection of free resources for folks at my keys to literacy website um and they include printables but also links to um you know videos and free archive webinars and a whole bunch of other stuff so I'm going to ask the the town folks uh if you I think the the thing we were going to do is uh give me a phone call so um if somebody wants to do that you can start letting me know about what questions you want to pose and there it is it's coming in thank you but hopefully we won't have too much reverberation all right what's the first question okay the first one is what do we have Reverb just to clarify are we good that's okay as long as I can hear it I'll I'll repeat it go ahead what suggestions do you have to help students with spelling words with the schwa sound in the past I've had them write the word or determine which syllable was unaccented and then allow them to ask Siri or look up how to spell the word is this okay okay that's a great question um so I think I mean look um when in doubt you know what hold on let me I'm I'm just going to lower the volume here so you don't hear the Reverb okay when in doubt um you know and there's no other way then sure look up look it up right why not um but but part of teaching Advanced word study is teaching kids about multi-syllable words and how we Flex where we um where we put our stress in words and so if we're doing Advanced word study which also includes morphology work right Roots suffixes prefixes and there's lots of reasons to be focusing on this not just for spelling but also because it supports vocabulary right and figuring out the meaning of an unknown word if we can have students focus on what they think the root word is right so let's see if I can think of an example [Music] um oh I I'm not going to be able to come up with one right right away but um you know what whatever that that that root word is very often if it's a one or two syllable word you're going to hear the vowel um pronounced more more holy it won't be schwa so you'll hear that long a sound or that long I sound right and then or the short or the short sound of the vowel and then once it gets put into the the longer word that has prefixes and suffixes it might change its sound to become schwa but the students are thinking about the the original vowel so schwa is tough I mean there's no way around it right but um I think trying to have kids think about what is the original root word may enable them to uh remember the sound the other thing that that some people tell me work for them is they'll have kids repeat the words say the word but instead of doing the schwa sound where where it where it normally is they will in a sense it's sort of like mispronouncing it but like say the word but then pronounce the vowel in its in its true long or short form now the word might not be recognizable that way but it's allowing them to hear that sound and Associate it with the letter that they're seeing and that may help some students remember it more um all right let's see let me raise this another question yes according to your research and expertise what grade level should spelling stop oh I think never but um let me lower this well first let me say this I am not a researcher so I do not conduct research so what I do is I look to the people that do that for a living and that's why I felt it was important at the beginning of the book to summarize for you and give you links to some of the best researchers who are out there um but I I think well let me say this I won't tell you how old I am but you can sort of guess if you if you know when I started my career right I am still learning to spell words so uh I I think there's there's always room to learn now what I think might be underlying the question is you're asking well what if it's a 16 year old who really can't spell I mean like how much time are we gonna put into that and um I think that there are some wonderful adaptive technology tools that are out there to help people who do have difficulty with spelling or who might let's as it relates to writing might have difficulty with fine motor right and so we don't want to prohibit them from expressing themselves in writing from from saying from composing the important messages that they have to share with others and so if we can get around that transcription roadblock by using things like Tech to text to speech why not do it but um I also get upset sometimes when I see students who are in fifth grade you know even sixth grade and their spelling is poor and everybody just gives up completely on it you know maybe it's because for the first part of my career I worked at a school for students with dyslexia and watch so often these students with just a little bit of um it would have to be tier two and three intervention right but a little bit of spelling and instruction jump that up by a couple of years and so I don't think we should give up too too early on these kids um it's interesting that both the questions right now have been related to the transcription strand um does anybody have a question related to the um to the writing craft strand that you can see you there so what do you think you have a question for me related to writing craft for handwriting I find stamina is an issue which I propose is due to a lack of sustained practice also there's an inconsistency and instruction regarding path and movement and fluency with the skill forming letters whether manuscript or cursive yeah yeah so again we we have another question here that's related to handwriting and um I'm not trying to dodge the question but you know the the purpose of the writing rope um it's not focused on handwriting and keyboarding and a spelling right it's that I really do think takes place more in a phonics in a phonics lesson um and again also the focus of the book is on grades four and up because I think the issue of transcription and how you teach it to a kindergartner or first grader is different than how you might address it with older students which as I was just saying before the older the students get if the transcription is problematic due to some sort of a learning disability right or dyslexia you know a language-based LD or maybe dysgraphia that we want to at that point not give up on trying to fill in those holes but um making let's make sure that we're using adaptive technology so that they can get around that issue um yeah thank you just just I know we're sort of running out of time here but just one last thing just don't have any resources to support teachers in providing feedback to students um yeah so uh you know in chapter um I forget the number now but it's the chapter where I talk about the three types of writing and text structure around that one of the things I actually have in the book is uh examples of generic feedback checklists for both um informational and argument uh I also have in there an example of a peer-to-peer feedback checklist I really believe that when it comes to giving students feedback on their writing um that checklists are much better than rubrics rubrics are more for adults who need to score students writing that's really different than if you're trying to give students feedback so if you look at some of the checklists in the book you'll see it breaks down things like um uh like transition did the student use transitions or not how did the student do writing their their in their introduction if it was an opinion piece did they State their position in the introduction these are the kinds of things that give kids specific feedback so that um the next time they go to write something they can focus pick one or two of those things and focus on those correction areas instead of you know redlining everything that's quote wrong with the writing and then the students get overwhelmed so I guess in this short amount of time I guess my answer to that question about feedback is I believe feedback checklists are much better than than traditional rubrics and it looks like we're out of time so um well thank you everyone for joining us for this evening's book study session we are grateful to Joan for deepening our knowledge of transcription skills and writing craft the recording for this presentation will be added to the padlet aligned to this book study series as well as on the patent YouTube channel and the patent literacy resource hub