We are
in week four of our summer linky book study over Talking, Drawing, Writing.
Thus far it has been an excellent book on how to introduce writing to our very
youngest learners. Coming from upper grades experiences, it has been very
insightful on the best practices in the teaching of reading.
Chapter
four consisted of several lesson plans that help students use more detail in
their drawings. As the book stated, effective writers use specific detail to
inform their audiences. This detail may be in the form of detailed drawings
with our younger learners and in the form of words for our older storytellers.
As I
read through the chapter, I was so impressed with the quality of the drawings
that these young authors were creating. There was so much attention to detail,
much more than I ever saw from my second and third graders. Perhaps it was
because at that age our main focus is the actual words, publishing with
drawings is just the icing on the cake that often gets tossed aside when we run
short of time. However, after reading this book, I feel like the students would
have more to write about and more detailed paragraphs if they had been able to
express their ideas in detailed illustrations.
One question
that keeps running through my head as I read this book is the timeframe. How long/how
many days are these teachers spending on teaching children to draw? Do they
spend a week on actual drawing lessons and then reinforce the skill throughout
the year? After participating in this book study, I definitely see such a need
for students to learn the craft of drawing because it directly influences
student writing in such a positive way.
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