One thing about this chapter that jumped out to me were the quotes by authors. Stephen King says: "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around those two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." I agree. How else are we to be exposed to writing unless we read it? Reading is often where an idea for writing comes from. In fact, Routeman says to have students reread what they have written in order to help them move along in their writing.
I love the idea of having the students keep small notebooks to answer questions about reading in. Routeman also talks about asking the right kinds of questions to encourage the students to think about what they are reading rather than glaze over it, spit out an answer and forget it.
Non-fiction reading and writing seems to be difficult. However, when you think about it, kids love reading books about animals, construction, gross and gooey stuff, how to's etc. I remember when I was in 4th grade, we had a kid's news paper that we would get every so often. It was printed on news print and each issue had a theme. We had many different activities to do with the paper over the course of the week.
Non-fiction writing can be tricky too, but I think that Routeman has some great ideas on how to implement the use of non-fiction materials.
Whatever we do, we need to keep our kids reading and writing about anything and everything.
Great ideas on incorporating non-fiction materials! Because I like fiction more, I tend to want to choose that for my classroom library but I find my students, especially the boys, drawn to the book of world records things like that. Good reminder, thanks!
ReplyDeleteThis statement by King about the importance of reading and writing if you want to be a writer reminds me of the saying K.I.S.S. - keep it simple stupid. Really, there is no magic to being a good writer. It's about diligence.
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