Work, Space and Time by Ray

Summary: If children put on the shoes of an author an hour every day, they can’t help but grow into that role.  Writing workshop is all about demonstrating to students what writing is all about, giving them the tools and space a person needs to write stories, and providing a structured, routine, and consistent atmosphere to develop their writing skills.  When all of this takes place, children are excited about their writing and their ability to create a book.

Like all things in life, the mastery of writing and creating a book only comes with time, practice, experience and reflection.  Just as the wide reading is the best way to develop vocabulary, a wide variety of writing allows children at a young age to tap into their creative side.  When the teacher tells them they are going to get the opportunity to create books just like Eric Carle, or whoever their favorite author may be, this builds excitement for creating their own book, which leads to an excitement for writing. 

As I personally reflect on this article, it makes me want to be a kid again.  When teachers are intentional about making learning fun, students forget that they are in forced to be there are actually begin to learn.  While I have never loved writing myself, when I read this article, it makes me want to write.  While it is very structured, it doesn’t put kids in a box.  This approach allows them to work for as long as they want to on a certain book, how they want to, where they want to, and write on what is interesting to them. And that, is exactly how to draw students in.  If I have learned anything in my education classes over the years, it has been every student has a unique learning style and no student can be put in a box. 

It is really good for me to read articles like this because as a math person, I am so black and white.  In math, its either right or wrong.  This type of problems solving has created me to be this very strategic thinker and try to map out every situation.  I loved the freedom in this article.  While they may have been talking about giving students freedom in writing, this made me see the importance of giving students freedom in math. But how could this be done?  Rather than making math so routine, and task oriented, what if a math classroom was focused on the idea of problem solving?  What if, rather than giving students 25 math problems to do a night, I asked them to perform a variety of problem solving tasks? However, I have also begun to understand that standardized tests control today’s classroom. So, now this leaves me with one question, is it possible to meet those standards and still allow students freedom in their learning?