Floating on a Sea of Talk: Reading & Writing Done Right!

Have you ever had students who conduct great research, take notes, and complete an outline only to find they cannot write the paper because they don’t understand everything they’ve written down? Helping students with their first research paper can sometimes be a daunting task, but 5th grade teacher, Jessica Mossman, found some help through the integration of technology in her classroom.

Searching for a way to help the students with the writing part of the process, Jessica turned to a book by JoAnn Portalupi and Ralph J. Fletcher - Nonfiction Craft Lessons:  Teaching Information Writing K-8.  An excerpt from that book led Jessica to insert an extra step this year in the research paper process:

“James Britton once said that in a classroom 'reading and writing float on a sea of talk.'  Talk helps students discover what they know and what they need to know next.  It helps them integrate what they are learning into their own understandings.”

Between the outline and rough draft stages, students were asked to teach their classmates about their selected topic using the information gleaned from their sources.  Knowing the best way to really understand what you’re learning is to teach someone else, the students were asked to create a teaching video about their topic.  Using their notecards or outline and an iPod touch as the tool, students were given the choice of Sock Puppets, Sonic Pics, or the video recorder to create their teaching piece.  Students then shared their video with a partner and after discussion and/or editing, the video was ready for viewing by three other classmates. Each peer who viewed the video responded in an email by completing three sentence stems:

1) Your video was mostly about …...

2) A summary of your video is ….........

3) One thing I learned from your video..... 

If the three peer editors’ reviews were in agreement and clear, the writer was then ready to begin the writing process. If not, conversation with the peers helped with the understanding of the topic.

For those of us who remember writing research papers BEFORE technology, I think we truly appreciate the other tools now available. Jessica used an Outlining Video to explain the outlining process, a Brainpop "Citing Sources" movie to introduce citing sources, and of course, easybib.com to make the citation process much easier.  If you have other tools you use to aid in this process, please share!

~Jeline Harclerode, TRC Facilitator, Emporia USD