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Last week, I hosted a training for teachers of lower grades (K-2) with a focus on reading and writing integration. While I can’t post the whole training here, I thought I’d talk quickly about a few things that anyone can do to help integrate reading and writing in the classroom.
I wanted to go ahead and link a few articles that I found interesting about the integration of reading and writing.
- https://www.k12reader.com/the-relationship-between-reading-and-writing/
- https://writingcooperative.com/why-writing-is-more-important-than-reading-dd561635841c
- https://images.app.goo.gl/7piKEwvAiV452YoJ6
- https://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2020/01/writing_directly_benefits_students_reading_skills.html
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Let’s start by listing, shall we? Anyone who has been around for awhile knows that I’m BIG on listing. It is so beneficial for so many reasons, and lists in the writing notebook that focus on books, characters, settings, and things of this nature will help your students make better connections to their reading.
Here are a few that I like:
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The Just Like Me List: A list to show how we can connect to the characters we read about in books. This would be great to use while you are going over text connections (Text-to-Self, Text-to-Text) as a way to jot down the students’ connections after your read-alouds or even as they read independently, after you’ve gone over it as a whole class, of course.
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The Characters Have Feelings…and So Do I List: This list is to encourage students to think about the emotions of their characters and how they are just like us. Many times, students go through the motions of reading and don’t even think about how their characters are feeling. This is a great list to accumulate through the year with the books that students read together or independently.
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The Books I Love List: This is a great list for students to use to catalogue their favorite books. As teachers, we ask students all the time about the books they read and what their favorites are. This is a list that forces students to think back about the books they’ve read and write down their favorites. You can set limitations or rules (ex: you must read the book x number of times before it goes on the list; you must have a solid reason and be able to explain why you love it; etc.) or you can just let them write what they think. Totally up to you.
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The In My Book Travels, I Visited… List: This is a great list to help students think about the different settings in their books. Setting tends to be something hard for students to remember, so this is a way to have students write down all those places they’ve been through their reading. We want students to know that they “go places” when they read books, and this list helps them see just that.
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The Lesson Learned List: This list is to keep track of all the great lessons that our characters learn in the books we read. So many times, our characters go through experiences that lead them to learn a lesson of some sort. When we bring kids’ attention to that, they start to actually look for a lesson that characters could learn, even if it wasn’t part of that lesson. This helps them to become better readers and writers…because when they begin to write a story with characters, students know that those characters can learn lessons just like the characters they read about in books. This will also help TREMENDOUSLY as they grow and get into more difficult texts (in both reading and writing).
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The Problem/Solution List: This list, like the Lesson Learned list, helps students to see the connections of problems (or conflicts) and solutions (or resolutions) as they read their texts. It helps them to see that they are not alone in their struggles. It also shows them that characters in stories (narrative/fiction) go through problems and will work to solve that problem. It’s how stories tend to go…
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And then there are text structures. Use text structures to organize ANY piece of writing. You can use them after a science experiment, before a lesson on a new topic, during the lesson to check for understanding of a specific concept, as an exit ticket or quick assessment, to explain how to do a math problem…you name it. You can use text structures for #allthethings.
For those of you who are interested in a book that will rock your world with teaching text structures to your little learners, check out this book. I use it a lot with my students in class (both as a 4th and 2nd grade teacher, actually) and as station work. The beauty of it is…once they have experience with a couple of them, they are ready to tackle ANY of the lessons in the book…because they ALL follow the same organization pattern. The students absolutely know what to expect and how they will go about writing their own pieces.
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There are some planning pages that go right along with the Nursery Rhyme book. I’m linking the Blank Structures here so that you have access to them and can download them for yourselves. (This is a zipped file. You will need to double click it after downloading to open up the folder. There you will find 3 different levels of planning pages – two box structures, three box structures, and four box structures.) We use these all the time in class as well. It’s a great way to show students how to organize their writing before writing their draft.
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The last thing I wanted to share was some extension/activity ideas that can be used in multiple grade levels:
- Mystery box with items inside. Students must use adjectives or specific academic vocabulary to describe what is inside.
- Use sentences starters. ALWAYS! In everything that you do, train your students to use the appropriate language.
- Make sure your students are ALWAYS talking in groups or with a partner and not overlooked. This will impede both reading and writing when they feel that they have no voice.
- Use sticky notes. A LOT. Allow students to jot notes about the text they are reading, their questions, their wonderings, their future ideas, their expert knowledge, their newfound knowledge.
- Incorporate into your stations. Many times we do not have lots of time as a whole class, but students can be expected to do some of the drafting on their own. They can do free writing, extend a story, pass the story, roll a story, etc.
- Try VERY HARD to write the genre you are reading and read the genre you are writing (if you spend time doing genre units). This helps to cement the information.
- Use REAL literature. All the time. Use it to explore grammar. Explore lessons. Explore craft. When you see that an author did something that caught your eye, take a closer look at it. Celebrate it. Bring it to life in your classroom. Stop right there and have students try it out when it’s appropriate. Or as a response.
- Use text structures to talk about both reading and writing. You can pull a structure from reading just like you can start with one in writing. It’s the backwards approach, and this will help students understand their reading much better when they can do this.
- Encode/Decode in the same session. Rather than having a separate “spelling time,” allow students an opportunity to both read and write the words. Start in isolation and then move into sentences.
- Instill in students that reading is where we learn about the world. It’s where we are able to leave the comforts of what we know and learn about other times, other places, other people.
- Writing is our way of sending a message. When we read, we are reading someone else’s message. We want to make sure that message is received well on both ends!
And there you have it! Several ways that you and your students can connect reading and writing effectively. While this is in no way a comprehensive list, these are things that I’ve found helpful in my own classroom over the years.
What do you do to connect reading and writing? How do you get your kiddos to think about reading like a writer and about writing like a reader? We would LOVE to hear your suggestions in the comments. Have a question? Feel free to ask in the comments as well.
Until next time…
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