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Development of Communication Skills within the Writing Workshop 

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Graphic Organizers

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                                               Anchor Charts 

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                                               Anchor Charts 

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“Anchor charts are a key piece of the mini-lesson. This is how the teacher leaves a fingerprint of the teaching. The anchor chart should be able to support students as they go into independent work. It allows the teacher to work with small groups or confer one-on-one with students without being constantly interrupted by students who need re-teaching. For this reason, the anchor chart should be comprehensible for students. Limit the text and support the text with visuals and graphics. The anchor chart should give students clear, step-by-step guidance for their work.” (Gonzalez, 2017, May 26).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwvXyDOKlX8
This particular mini lesson example focused on the use of a diagram within a student written "about" book. A mentor text about spiders was used to show how one can use a diagram to teach his or her reader about a particular subject. In line with the gradual release of responsibility instructional practice, the teacher then allowed students to aid her in labeling her own flower diagram. Students were instructed to do a "turn and talk" with a peer to discuss what diagram they may use in their own books. After a brief regroup, the students were allowed to go back to their seats to start working on their diagrams. During independent time, the teacher walked around to conference with different students regarding their work.

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English Language Learners: One benefits of a mini-lesson during a writing workshop is to give clear instruction of what is expected from the teacher. The mini-lesson are short, with focused speech from the teacher. Slowing down speech can contribute to an adapted environment for struggling students. Students are practicing listening and speaking skills throughout the lesson.
English language learners benefit from the writing workshop because it is a step by step process. The students are take their time determining what they would like to write about and if they are struggling to come up with an idea to write about, culturally relevant read aloud text could remind students of their home life or heritage, giving them an opportunity to feel comfortable to write about their lives. The peer and teacher conferences held during the workshop also reduces the chance of an ELL student falling behind in their writing. During conferences, their peers are aiding in word choice and structure, while the teacher may help with conventions and sentence fluency.

Every student need a goal for their writing, so they can learn how to achieve it. Not every student is going to have the same goal, so accommodating to each goal to the best of your ability as a teacher benefits all students. Struggling students benefit from smaller settings because they help lower the affective filter. Smaller settings can help students process their thinking and understanding of the material, build confidence to answer questions and provides comfort. Anxiety levels may be lowered due to smaller settings and allows for more interaction when helping students. It gives them more opportunities to practice new skills and adapt them to new material. Struggling students will be given the opportunity to develop writing, listening and speaking skills through this accommodation. Depending on the severity of the issue, teachers can use a guided group, a strategy group, or work with students one-on-one.

(Gonzalez, 2017, May 26).

Students with Special Needs:

Students with special needs may benefit from the same accommodations as ELL students. Small group instruction puts the focus on these students, but what happens when a student is deaf, blind, or immobile? What if the mini-lesson involves students moving around the room to talk? What can we do as educators to meet the needs of students with special needs?

Voice-to-text software can help students with learning disabilities, in addition to benefiting the general education students. The device interprets speech into written language. The translation from the device can help all students, including general, special needs, and ELL students. A student with a physical disability could benefit from voice-to-text. As a teacher, you can also have students with disabilities draw pictures instead of writing out brainstorming. Drawing can actually help students with disabilities communicate and express their thoughts, and can benefit students with dysgraphia, which is a disability regarding writing skills. Writing can be a complex task for students who are learning disabled, so drawing can help them write, organize, and revise their papers through visual representations of their thoughts. Another accommodation that could benefit students with disabilities is a digital pen. Digital pens are the only pen that has audio recording that links written words into spoken language before it is transferred to digital files. These pens help meet the literacy needs of students with disabilities in both reading and writing. The digital pens provides instructional support in three areas, such as study skills, independent work, and assessment.

(Stears, 2017, March 26).

Gifted Students:

Gifted students are considered to be more advanced than their grade level curriculum. The intelligence level of a gifted child is significantly higher than the average student. Accommodation for gifted students involved challenging them due to their high intelligence level. Teachers should be pushing these students to a higher standard by adding additional punctuation or formatting to their writing. This could include capitalization, periods, colons, semi-colons, ellipses, dialogue, paragraphs, indentation and more. Usually a lesson is directed towards a certain genre, so changing up the motive behind the writing can help challenge a gifted student. Lessons with a twist can add a nice challenge for students who finish early, but be careful to know the students abilities so you do not over challenge them. We want all of our students to find the activity engaging and fun, not impossible. Another practice that can be altered could involve vocabulary and spelling. If you find that a gifted student is excelling in their vocabulary, you can look for more challenging words for them to find, or you can put them to work and find challenging words on their own. This gives them a separate task to complete, which could mean the child will finish the same time as the rest of the class. Give them a dictionary or a thesaurus and keep them busy! Provide a separate notebook so gifted students can collect difficult vocabulary and have them define them. Teachers could even ask them to sort them a certain way, such as in alphabetical order or difficulty level. These strategies may benefit students of all intellectual levels, but incorporating these ideas for gifted students during a short mini-lesson gives them extra work and provides time management for the entire class.

(Weigle, 2018, September 19)

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WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF WRITING WORKSHOP?
"Primarily it focuses on writing as a process instead of focusing on evaluating the product" (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 111).
Audio: (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 112).

COMPONENTS OF WRITING WORKSHOP-
Read Aloud: Reading aloud can help build ideas and thoughts about their writing. Read aloud books can serve as a mentor text, to highlight any key quality such as word choice. It can help build listening skills and possibly build a bridge to home or culturally relevant material. This is a great strategy to help listeners understand the order of ideas in a text. When you hear the text out loud, you may recognize ideas that you would have missed if you were to just read the text independently. Reading aloud helps students understand transitions of sentences, changes in topic, and can help the listener develop a topic of interest for writing time.

Mini-lesson (10-15 minutes): A mini-lesson is a short and direct lesson focused on the main topic presented in the classroom that day. They relate to classroom procedures, the writer’s process, the qualities of good writing, and editing skills. A mini-lesson highlights one skill or trait to focus on and emphasizes one key quality of the reading. Mini-lesson topics are usually a decided topic after viewing the students’ writing. "Topics for mini-lessons should emanate from teachers' observations f students writing interests and processes" (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 126). In general terms, there are five broad categories of content for mini-lessons, such as techniques, strategies, understandings, conventions, and questions. (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 127).

Writing time: Writing time gives children the opportunity to write about ideas of their own choice. Children are drafting, planning, rereading, revising, proofreading, and communicating with others about their writing. Communication can include teacher conferencing and student to student conferencing. In the book Reading, Writing, and Talk it states, that conferences should help children identify and grow ideas to write about (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 129). Students can locate themselves to different areas of the room to write. Writing time is the most important component out of the four tools.

Sharing: In the book Reading, Writing and Talk, it states that sharing is a commonly used procedure that may close the writing workshop (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 131). During this time students can perform their writing, engage with a real audience, answer their peers’ questions, and teach and learn from their peers (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2016, pg. 131). This can happen in smaller groups or as a whole class. It can help build confidence, excitement, and an authentic audience for their piece of writing.

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Theses classrooms are set-up in a way that a productive writing workshop can be conducted. The carpet allows for the all of the children to become focused and attentive to either, the mini lesson focusing on a specific writing trait or a read aloud. Group tables allows for students to work both individually when needed and have easy access to peers for conferencing. The open space allows for students to move around the classroom freely and to sit comfortably wile they are writing their work.