Writing is awesome at Grand Prairie Elementary School

There is a new excitement about writing at Grand Prairie Elementary School, thanks to a writing incentive being piloted this year for kindergarten through second grade students.  Writers’ workshops are being conducted for 40 minutes each day, with students as young as kindergarten age writing and illustrating their own books.

The pilot is “Units of Study in Opinion, Information and Narrative Writing.” It is based on the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a research and staff development organization housed at Teachers College, Columbia University, founded by professor and author Lucy Calkins. The organization works with thousands of schools. It has developed state-of-the-art tools and methods for teaching of reading and writing, for using performance assessments and learning progressions to accelerate progress, and for literacy-rich content-area instruction.

Grand Prairie’s teacher training was funded through U.S. Department of Education Title One grants. Teachers Barb Shanahan, Danielle Pizzolato, Jill Beckes, Michelle Piunti and Karyn Hermes were trained in New York this past summer. Kindergarten teacher Michelle Piunti stated, “The training was awesome!  It was such a great experience. I wish every teacher could have the opportunity to do it.”  The five-day training provided them with a wealth of information to bring back to their classrooms and fellow teachers. 

The writing pilot coordinates with the Common Core State Standards Initiative being implemented in District 157-C schools over the past three years.  Based on long-term goals of college and career readiness for all students, as well as global readiness, the Common Core State Standards call for a general ramping-up of expectations for students at all levels, and specifically higher-level thinking skills as they pertain to reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

First grade teacher Barb Shanahan stated, “Our trip solely focused on writing and we got our information straight from the big names in writing!”  She said the Project’s website and videos are also very helpful because they are designed by grade level to problem-solve and it meshes with the Common Core Standards.   She continued, “One of the biggest pieces of the program is conferring with the students about what they have written. It gives them more verbiage about writing itself.  We look for the positive in their writing and make it important.” Teachers learned to make their own “Tool Kit” for conferring. It is filled with kid-friendly ideas and reminders to reinforce what students learned such as “I tried to make a beginning for my story,” “I put my pages in order” and “I put the picture from my mind onto the page.”

The writing initiative is grade-level specific and follows grade by grade with goals for the students so that the same language for writing is carried through all the grades.  In kindergarten, students began with organizational skills and writing/drawing on one sheet of paper.  They learned how to use materials and put them away, to date stamp their work, the difference between a “done” side and a “not done” side and to file their writing in a special folder.  As they progressed, they learned to staple and add more pages to make booklets or scrolls.

The children were excited to make up a title for their writing and design a cover page. Ms. Shanahan suggested that first graders make their books “fancy” like real authors by using details, varied sentence structure, capital letters, punctuation, transition words, pop-out words and different types of print.

With music softly playing in the background, Mrs. Piunti encouraged her students to add to their pictures and words, using more than one page as needed.  She walked around the room, sitting down to confer with students about their writing, asking questions such as “What happens next?” or “What kind of adventure will they have?”   After sharing their work with their writing partners, the kindergarteners said to each other, “Thanks for sharing, good job on your booklet today!”