Writing About Literature

I have always thought that writing about literature is one of the more exciting aspects of teaching English. It is a way for students to be “essayists, editorialists, playwrights, fiction writers, poets.” I really enjoyed the freedom I was given in college to take something that was important to me in whatever it was that I was reading and roll with it. I want to, in some ways, incorporate that kind of freedom/choice into my middle school classroom. I want students to care about what they are writing and they need to feel like they are having a say in their work in order to really make it significant to them. I think students also must be exposed to a wide variety of writing styles. Some may not like to write an essay all the time, while other students hate poetry work. The multi-genre paper, which I was introduced to when I was in college, is a great way to incorporate many types of writing styles. I loved writing mine and I think it can be incorporated into the classroom quite nicely and easily. It can be used with a unit plan or as a 6 weeks project. In the end, it is something the kids will be proud of doing and they will have a binder-of-sorts of all their accomplishments, together for all to see.

Something interesting, that I agree with, yet had not specifically thought about for a while was the fact that teachers need to be writers. If teachers want to teach writing, they must develop their craft. If they do so, they will discover what works and what does not, what is beneficial, what takes time, where frustrations may set in, and etcetera. Teachers also need to think about the students they will be teaching. Rief gives us questions to as ourselves as writing teachers, “What do I believe and why? How do I shape those beliefs into sound practices in my classroom? Who are the students with whom and from whom I learn, to whom I teach, and for whom I care and have a responsibility.” If we think about these questions before we teach, we may be able to better prepare our lessons and our students for the assignments and challenges to come.

Also, something that I 100% agree with in the reading is that one cannot write without reading. I think it is extremely important for reading and writing to be taught hand in hand and relationships between the two illustrated often. Finally, I think a writers journal or folder is essential for students. It gives them a place to put their ideas, and also, they are all in one spot and much harder to lose.

Media in the Classroom

Media in the English classroom has mainly seemed to be a reward/relaxation time for me when I was in middle and high school. We would read a novel or play, and then we would watch the movie. That would give us two or three class periods where we did not have to do anything, because we were never asked to do something with what we watched. I think that media needs to be used for a meaningful purpose. Media needs to be used in a way that makes something more alive, vivifying the text or activity; students need to be aware that media can be approached critically and can expand an experience. I really liked the idea of analyzing magazines (339), however once the students performed the four steps the book talked about, I think it would be interesting to expand off of that and have students write their own article for the magazine and use the tools they learned while dissecting it in their previous activities/assignments. I also really liked the idea for the bumper stickers. We had to make a bumper sticker in one of my education classes; they had to speak to our field of study. It was concise, interesting ways to think about my English profession and how I could sum up something I love about teaching into a few words. I believe I may be teaching quite a bit of grammar next semester, and I think it may be a fun idea to give a student, or pairs of students, each a grammar term and have them come up with bumper stickers that help us remember the term in a clever, precise way. They can then be presented and hung around the room.

Last week, at Dalton, we had the students look at pictures and think about what the poems they were about to read could be about just from looking at the picture. The students were able to think visually, and many of them picked out minute details that ended up being important in the poem(s). We also read a poem a few weeks back and had the students draw what they heard before we gave them the poem – we did not give them the title of the poem because it would have given the topic away. The kids need to think more creatively, and from the pictures we were able to see how well the students were listening and understanding what they were hearing.

Vocabulary Instruction

Teaching vocabulary is something that all English teachers are going to have to do to some degree in their classrooms. My cooperating teacher has an interesting way to teach vocabulary – it is called CSSD. (Context – Structure - Sound & Definition).

This is a sentence that was demonstrated on the board for my 8th graders, “When I retire, I plan to live at the beach in a peaceful, picturesque setting.” The students then drew three boxes side by side in their notebooks, one for context, one for structure (root word), and one for sound. Then we went over the sentence. The kids looked for words in picturesque that sounded like any other words they had heard – they came up with “picture.” They also thought the word picturesque could be broken down into the root word “picture.” Then the students went to the sentence to look for context clues. They came up with “beach” and “peaceful” and they thought the sentence described a place that was “happy” and “beautiful.” From those three boxes, the students create their own definition, which was “like a beautiful picture.” After doing this with all their vocabulary words they look them up in the dictionary to see how accurate they were.

This is by no means a full proof way to teach vocabulary, but it is really a good way to get students looking at the word and the sentence(s) around it to try and use context clues to make sense of a word they do not know. Not every box in the CSSD method will be used with every word and that took a few practice tries for students to see that. I think that once students get a feel for how to use the CSSD it could be very useful for them and something they can do in their head eventually once it becomes more of a habit to them. This technique will be helpful for them when they are reading individually as well as trying to determine a definition on an SOL test. When it come time to test the 8th graders, my cooperating teacher gives them a test that is a little more advanced than a fill in the blank/matching test. The vocabulary tests usually take a vocabulary word and then have the student pick the synonym or the antonym in the form of multiple choice questions. I think this shows if the students really do grasp the concept of the word – often times student are also asked to use the word in a sentence they create themselves.


As the book says, I really do think that books and reading are a key way to strengthen vocabulary knowledge, and many times kids do not even know they are learning new words. I also think audio-assisted readings are a great idea for the classroom. This has been done in the middle school I am working at and it gives kids a chance to follow along and the reader can set the mood and enunciate words that a child might not be able to figure out. This also has the downfall of students zoning out, but I think it is important to stop the tape at specific point and go back and discuss to make sure students are understanding and are staying on task. Finally, it is important that students have multiple encounters with new words. The contexts of new words need to be meaningful as well as useful. For a student to really remember a word, they need to ad detail to the word, make associations/elaborate on it, as well as see it in multiple situations.