Results from Survey 1

Results:

Previously I blogged about administering my first survey to the students where they were able to use highlighters and mark their answers for how they feel about writing. The options were:

• not at all
• a little
• some
• a lot
• a whole lot

The results are as follows

I found that the majority of students who enjoyed reading, also enjoyed writing. I have often heard reading and writing go hand in hand as long as I have been teaching! In a study done by Furgerson, it was noted students awareness of print drastically increased with interactive writing. Not only did this process make her students better writers, it also increased their reading, (Button, K., Johnson, M., & Furgerson, P., 1996, p. 451).I have seen this in my students, almost the entire class is reading on a Level G/H or higher. On grade level right now is H. The highest is reading an N level....that's 8 kids!!! This survey also gave me the opportunity to see not many students enjoy writing at home.

Question:

Maybe this means most students only see writing as a "chore" or something to do as "work"..this response has been a common theme when talking to students. I wonder if this impacts their writing. What if students could see writing as a leisure activity...

You see post-it notes to the side...these are the things students

said they enjoyed writing about in their free time. Notice the post it that says, "I like to color"...this comes from the student

who could not stand to write- my "Tea Cup puppy" girl. :) She

couldn't think of ONE thing she liked to write about when we

did this survey. My boys LOVE to write about wrestling. Some students (who also only write at school) said they like to write about weather.

From this survey I gathered the majority of the students do have positive thoughts about writing. One question asked:

Writing is fun...students responded:

25% said not at all

6% a little

19% some

0 % a lot

50% a whole lot

I feel this survey is going to be beneficial when I write my findings!

Button, K., Johnson, M., Furgerson, P. (1996). Interactive writing in a primary classroom. The Reading Teacher, 49(6).

Writing Samples

Writing Samples

Part of my data I have been collecting throughout the study are writing samples. I have collected them at least once a week and sometimes spontaneously throughout. If I saw something great from a student, I would save it for later use. I have been super proud of the work and also used the sample writing to help lead me in my lessons to come. According to McCarrier, A., Pinnell, G. & Fountas, I., (2000), "interactive writing provides powerful demonstrations of writing that help young children make progress in their own writing." (p. xvi) I believe this now more than ever. Through the interactive writing process students have transferred their knowledge gained in interactive writing to their independent writing. The following example shows the students underlining the conjunctions used to turn simple sentences into compound sentences. I used the interactive writing time to tie in the language arts lessons, conventions, and how to pick topics to write about. I feel the 30 minutes used twice a week have been truly beneficial.

When I look at this writing peice I notice the student using their capital letter sto emphasize emotion and voice in his writing. He did a phenomenal job with listening to the sounds in words and putting them in his writing. He is a student who knows all 500 of the Dolche sight words which helps is reading and writing quite a bit.

The following pictures are after we read a story as a whole group, I told them to go back to their seats and write. Some students chose to illustrate and others didn't. I feel like if they took the time to illsutrate they were really taking ownership of their work. These are the peices you will notice the highlighted conjunctions.

 

Thick Description #2

Writing has always been difficult for the majority of my students. One student in particular loathed writing. She is an African American girl who is very lively and most of the time eager to learn. She comes from a household of a working mother and is very proud of her daughter and happy with her progress.

In the morning the known procedure is to unpack your things, go to breakfast if you want, then begin writing in their writing journal. At the beginning of the writing journals students would write their 3 words and yell, "I have three sentences!"  As I reviewed my field notes from a prior date, I found this particular student taking their time unpacking..slowly putting things in their cubby, looking at the breakfast cards, talking with friends/teachers that entered the room. When she sat down, the announcements came on, she smirked and put her notebook away. It was like she felt she was "off the hook" per say.

Recently, I asked students to take a peice of paper out. They all put their names on their paper and they looked at me. I explained to students they had 15 minutes to write- they could choose the topic. I immediately looked this this student to see her reaction. To my surprise, she started writing with no visible signs of discouragement. She was writing without talking or taking her eye off of it. When she was done she smiled and was super proud.

 

This student was able to share her paper with other people in the building and I could tell she felt so happy with herself. From that point on- writing has been easier for this student. She comes in and starts writing. She will ask, "is it freewrite or are we writing what you want?"- - It is sooo nice instead of her dreading writing!

Final Interview

Questions

I gave students a blank piece of paper and had them answer the following questions:

• What is interactive writing?
• How do you feel about interactive writing?
• What have you learned from interactive writing?
• How do you feel about writing?

Findings

When students were asked questions about what interactive writing was, I found a lot of different answers. Some students began to quickly write what interactive writing was. Others were looking around the room for hints. To help those students, I drug our easel to the middle of the room and said, "this is what we use when we are interactive writing." There were light bulbs going off around the room. Students quickly began to write. Most students said it was, "writing in a group" or "writing together". One student said, "Interactive writing is picking a title and writing about it in a group." I was happy with this answer because I have stressed the importance of finding a "topic" to write about.

When asked what students learned from interactive writing I got some of the following answers:

• We learned about question marks and periods
• I learned great stuff
• I've learned you have to use spaces
• In interactive writing I've learned about animals, school, and other things (she is referring to the topics we wrote about)

*There were also quite a few blank lines for that question in particular. One of my *favorite* responses can be seen below!

Overall, when students were asked how they feel about writing- the majority enjoyed it. This is a change from the beginning of the school year!

 

Survey Says...

Writing Survey

Results

I gave students a short survey pertaining to their interest (or lack thereof) in writing. It was very short, two questions and at the end they were asked to write a complete sentence. My RQ is: How does interactive writing effect independent writing. I felt part of independent writing I wanted to see change was their general sentence structure and ability to write a complete thought. Upon receiving the sentences I saw students writing about several differnet things.

One question asked how students felt about writing. It gave three faces, asking students to circle the way they felt. After analyzing the data, I found the following results:

As you see, 50% of students felt happy about writing, 19% felt indifferent, and 31% felt sad when they were asked to write. I feel like these numbers are significant in the fact that such a large percentage of students do, in fact, feel happy when they are asked to write.


When asked "Do you write hwen you are at home for fun? 50% of students said yes they write at home and 44% said no. I had one student who wrote in "some" and circled it because they didn't want to circle yes or no. (see below)

Sample Sentences

Below you will see some sample sentences the students wrote on their own when asked to write.

You will notice the pictures below show the students are happy when asked to write and she likes to write for fun.In he free write sentence she writes about how she loves to write about her family and feelings when she writes. He loves his mom and dad. This tells me she writes for "fun" or for "leisure" and that is probably writing comes more naturally to her, she has more practice and ENJOYS it.

Holy Moly!

For our latest Unit assessment in Literacy we dictated a sentence and had the kids write it down on their paper. We were looking for

• capital letters where appropriate,
• spacing,
• punctuation

(all the things we have naturally been practicing in our interactive writing lessons).

WELL! I just finished grading both of my classes assessments. The morning class is the class I am unable to teach interactive writing lessons to. The percentage of students who correctly did the things listed above was 47%. I then took my afternoon class and calculated the percentage that could write a correct sentence and 84% did it correctly!!! One of the students who did not get it correct missed her capitals and punctuation- she is also the student who missed 2 weeks due to the flu. I could not be happier with the results I am getting.

I have had several people (adminstration included) complimenting my class on their writing. My question is....how can I decide if it is due to interactive writing???

Survey...1!

My homeroom comes to me at the end of the day and I needed to give them the survey. So I found a great way to get them motivated! :) I let them use highlighters, just a little side note in case you are ever wondering what makes kids excited. It's the little things. I explained how important this was for my study and it was so endearing to see how much time they spent picking an answer and at times asking me to elaborate on what I was asking. With that being said, there were a few students rushing through highlighting whichever they felt like at the time.

There was one student in particular. As the year has progressed he has become a better writer in all aspects of writing. One thing he struggles with is just sitting still. It is difficult for him to sit still during an activity. As he did the survey he listened VERY carefully and wanted to pick the right answer. I loved seeing how serious he took it.

There were 16 survey questions. 15 of those were closed and one was an open question where students were asked to write (some of those were interesting!)I have not had calculated the results but have not yet had the time to actually go through and group them according to the question. I plan to do that in the next couple of days. Overall, I feel from adding up the numbers that a majority of my students are somewhat OK with writing depending on the setting and the expectations. The majority of students in my classroom have a difficult time deciding what to write about. I have noticed that as I walk around the room but it was nice to have some validity in my assumption. Even with all of the mixed feelings towards writing, half of the class said they would like more time to write at school and 63% feel they are good writers. Very interesting data so far!