At first, I did not think that I would have the time to read Nancie Atwell's book In the Middle. However, once I picked up this book and started reading I could not stop! Atwell provides hundreds of useful mini-lessons, teaching strategies and forms that I can use in my reading or writing classroom. There are so many good ideas that I do not even know where to begin with this blog!
I think that chapter one is a good place to begin. In this chapter, Atwell says, "I participate with them in collaborative writing ventures, I submit poems and stories... (25)." Atwell explains that a good writing teacher is one that writes with their students. This is how a writing classroom should be. The teacher can not expect his or her students to go write a paper or creative writing assignment. The teacher needs to take the time to show students how it is done. This can be done numerous ways. The teacher could, and should, give an example of his or her writing. The teacher could model their writing habits on the overhead projector (I really liked this idea a lot!). Finally, the teacher could the time to just sit and write with the students. These all seem to be great ways to model good writing in the classroom.
Chapter ten goes into more detail behind modeling writing habits for students. "They begin to see the hundreds of choices I make every time I write. They see that almost nothing is accidental... (332)." I think that this is a fantastic way to show students the writing process. As Atwell says it helps students to "be ready." On page 367, Atwell receives feedback about these demonstrations. I found it interesting that the students were able to pick up on so much. These demonstrations helped the students to learn how to perfect their craft.
Chapter four in Atwell's book gave helpful tips on setting up the writing classroom. For instance keeping track. "...I put serious hours into the forms and folders we'll use for keeping records and collecting students' work throughout the year (104)." I found this section in particular to be very helpful. I really like her ideas behind the writing workshop and this provided examples of forms and ways to stay organized. I like the idea that the record keeping she uses puts the responsibility on the students. In student teaching, I have seen the amount of paper work that my cooperating teacher has to deal with. By making the students responsible for their record keeping, it alleviates some of the stress involved in teaching.
There are numerous other chapters that are very helpful as well. Chapter nine mentions portfolios and different goals behind them. Chapter six had hundreds of great ideas and mini-lessons that I would really like to use with my classes. Chapter seven gave some great ideas to evaluate writing, and the appendixes gave fantastic forms that I could easily use in my classroom.
Overall, this book was fantastic!! It gave me a ton of ideas for my classroom. I always thought that writing would be so dry and boring to teach, but Atwell changed my outlook on that!
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Atwell definitely changes the view that teaching writing is dry and boring.
ReplyDeleteShe gives so many ideas in her book and I agree with you that Atwell's way of handling writer's workshop is organized. Her minilessions in particular seem like they work very well. I think that students are appreciative of this type of lesson instead of a long lecture approach.
Her style of teaching is very hands on and I think she is an advocate of that!
I also thought that teaching writing would be a little boring. I mean what would we be teaching? How to write essays? That's what most teachers believe in teaching because that's what standardized tests want them to be able to do. But what about creative writing? Or multiple other forms of writing that are ignored? Atwell gives teachers another choice-a better choice to teach writing to their students.
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