Spotlight on Modeled Writing for the Beginning of the School Year
At the beginning of the school year, you want to learn about the students who are in your classroom. You want to learn about who they are as individuals, their backgrounds, and what they enjoy doing outside of school. Learning about your students will help you connect your students to the curriculum.
Writing is a great way to get to know more about your students as well as learn about them as writers. At the beginning of the school year, I love to teach modeled writing lessons – where I think aloud as I am writing and share my ideas about my writing with the students. This allows students to get to know more about me and they get to see how I approach my own writing – right from the beginning of the school year. They see how I select topics and then begin writing about them. For modeled writing lesson, the students are seated on the carpet or in their classrooms (I prefer that they sit on the carpet) and the teacher is in front of the class – writing on large chart paper or the SmartBoard.
At the beginning of the school year, I often find it challenging to begin modeled writing by itself without a shared text. I often select a book to use with the students that I can use for a writing piece. This allows me to model how I will select a topic that aligns with the focus of the book and then how I think through my writing. Below are two of my favorite books that I use with students at the beginning of the school year. I give a brief overview of the book and then an example of how I approach modeled writing lessons.
My Map Book by Sara Fanelli
This is one of my favorite books to use with students at the beginning of the school year because kids can easily relate to it. “My Map Book” is drawn and told from a child’s perspective, and it encourages readers to examine their own worlds. The author takes the reader on a journey through the maps of her life – a map of her family, a map of her day, and even a map of her tummy! This expands the definition of what a map is and invites students to create the maps of their lives by using similar maps as the author, or they can veering off course and creating maps of other parts of their world. I use “My Map Book” to show students how we read illustrations, so as writers we need to include as many details as possible into illustrations. I also explain how the labels are used by the author to support the reader’s understanding of the map.
You can create your own map in front of the students during a modeled writing lesson, showing your students what is important to you in your life, which will then invite the students to do the same in their own maps. This book and writing activity can be used for any grade – Kindergarten through fifth grade, but the expectations will be different for the different grade levels. For example, a kindergartener may create a book of 2-4 pages and may consist of mostly illustrations and some labels. A fifth grader, on the other hand, can expand their maps to places outside of the home and into more of their other interests. Students in the upper grades can add more text to their illustrations as well.
Regardless of the grade level you are teaching, be sure to model what you expect them to try in their own writing pieces. So, if you want your kindergarten class to add letters as labels (example: write ‘b’ above an illustration of a ‘bed’), then be sure to model that on your own writing.
Best Part of Me: Children Talk About Their Bodies in Pictures and Words by Wendy Ewald
An award-winning photographer asked children to answer the question, “What’s the best part of you?” The children’s responses are presented in this book. The photographs are in black and white and each child included in the book has written his/her own story in the child’s own handwriting, which I believe is so powerful. While reading the book to students, make sure to point out how we as the readers can get a glimpse into each child’s personality. For example, one of the children, Camila, included four stars that frame the title of her piece as well as her name. These are details that you can model in your writing and then your students can include them when crafting their own pieces.
You can do a similar activity with the students by posing the same question, “What’s the best part of you?” and then taking pictures of the students – either in black and white or color. Before asking the students to begin their writing, show them how you are approaching your response. Bring in a photograph of your favorite part of you – your smile, your hands, etc. and then talk through how you will write your answer to the question. The students can then begin their own writing piece by adding writing to go along with their photograph. What a great way to learn about everyone in the class! You can even hang the photographs and writing around the classroom. Once finished, the students’ work can be a springboard into conversations about diversity, including ways we are similar to one another, different from each other, and also unique.