Dialogue= Emerging First Grade Playwrights The topic of our
teacher demonstration lesson today: Writing Dialogues
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Essential Question How can we teach students how to write
dialogue in various content areas?
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Lesson Objective plays Students will be able to write dialogue
in various content areas by creating their own plays, stories,
poems, etc.
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Writing Across the Curriculum Writing is a great tool to
teach,reinforce, and assess the content that is being taught in the
different curricular areas. As children are learning to write, they
can use the strategies they are incorporating into their writing
pieces to demonstrate in purposeful and meaningful ways what they
are learning. As teachers we need to possess a huge reportoire of
strategies to help our students master the content being taught in
the different curricular areas. One of those strategies is dialogue
writing.
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Dialogue Writing Writing dialogue can be a powerful tool to
teach/assess content across different curricular areas. Writing
should be an important part of each social studies teachers
instruction. (Boyler, 158.)
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Classroom Plays Adult or Child Direction Study in Salt Lake
City, Utah Which is more effective for the acquisition of skills
across the curriculum?
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Mrs. Zs Little Ladybugs First Classroom Play 2009-2010
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Neighbors in Space
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Adult Directed? Adult Supervision This is where adults are
considered Co-opers Unfortunately, adults tried to control and
transmit ready-made plans instead of allowing the students to
mind-storm, imagine, and create.
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Kid Co-Opers One child stated, Youre supposed to practice a
play, else if you dont practice a play, youre gonna go out and do
it with someone just doing this: doo-da-doo-doo (acts goofy). Its
not going to be nothing. (Baker-Sennett, Matusov, and Rogoff
1012)
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Mindstorming In mind-storming, children explored ideas for
characters, lines, and movement without co- coordinating them into
themes, improvisationally bouncing off each others ideas. They
often started by developing characters as they tried on costumes
and experimented with props, which led to develop germs of ideas
about dialogue lines and themes of episodes as they brought their
characters together in mind- storming. (Baker-Sennett, Matusove
&Rogoff, 2008)
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Benefits of Kid Co-Ops Students learn leadership qualities and
then they also learn how to work cooperatively. They plan
procedures for putting the play/production all together. They
direct and perform. Through the performance they demonstrate
content and skill acquisitions that they have attained through
instruction.
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Script-writing for First Graders? You may ask, How can we teach
students to write scripts and become playwrights of content learned
in curriculum taught? Students can learn how to write these scripts
by developing characters, learning how to write dialogue, by their
implementation of inferences, plot, and sequence.
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Teachers Impressions of the Kid Co-Oping She wrote that when
she first viewed this session, her reaction was that it: was
confused, noisy, and sometimes irritating. I was glad when it was
over, and I was glad I was not present in the classroom [a
substitute had been there that day] Then I read the written
transcript, and began to understand more of what happened between
the kids and began to gain a perspective. I was still confused,
however, and decided to view the video again. The second viewing
surprised me enormously. I enjoyed it and I was not irritated at
all. (Baker-Sennett, Matusove, Rogoff, 2008)
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Result of Study With comfort sharing responsibility with
children- rather than controlling their behavior or the product-
adults may guide the childrens planning while still supporting the
improvisational mindstorming and planning of themes and their
details that we observed in the sessions directed by kid co-opers
(Baker- Sennett, Mustusove & Rogoff, 2008).
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Writing Dialogue for Second Language Learners The same literacy
strategies that are used with native speakers can and should be
used with students who are second language learners. The
expectations should be the same for both groups of students. In
both cases, language is learned out of a need communicating ones
feelings, thoughts, and ideas. (Barone 50)
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Learning Activity # 1 With a partner, discuss the image, talk
about it, and write your thoughts, feelings or ideas using
dialogue. Write a maximum of three lines. Not unlike journals,
diaries have long been the purview of historians searching for
primary sources. It makes sense, therefore, that teachers use this
genre to help students emphasize with the lives and struggles of
people who they study in class, and to better understand events in
history (Boyer 160).
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Learning Activity #2 Look at books on famous black-Americans.
Fill in speech- bubble graphic organizer by drawing the characters
and writing their dialogue. Share with the rest of the class.
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Other Supporting Research According to Fordham, Wellman, and
Sandman, Considering a topic under study and then writing about it
requires deeper processing than reading alone entails.(Knipper and
Duggan 462)
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Writing to Learn According to Fisher and Frey, Writing is often
left out of content classrooms because of an overemphasis on
process writing and the confusion between learning to write and
writing to learn. (Knipper and Duggan 462)
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Write What You Know and Dont Know Writing to learn is an
opportunity for students to recall, clarify, and question what they
know about a subject and what they still wonder about with regard
to the subject matter. (Duggan & Kipper 462)
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Play Writing Can Be Fun If the student believes that the
information is significant and meaningful, then they will actually
care about learning it. In my mind thats what matters more than
anything.(Clawson, MacLean, Mohr, Nocerino, Rogers, and Sanford
31)
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Fun Work Examples students gave of fun were rehearsals, team
and dance practices, and other individual long-term work that
developed into a product of which they were proud. Fun meant
achievement- real achievement. (Clawson, MacLean, Mohr, Nocerino,
Rogers, and Sanford, 31)
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Jan Bretts, The Mitten Play
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Baba (Estefani)
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Creating Greeting Cards
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Closure Activity Write one or two ideas on a piece of paper
that can be adapted to use with the age group of which you teach.
We will share our ideas in a moment.
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Readings and Research Baker-Sennett, Jacqueline, Eugene
Matusov, and Barbara Rogoff. Childrens Planning of Classroom Plays
with Adult or Child Direction. Social Development 17.4 (2008): 998-
1018. ERIC. Web. 12 June 2010. Boyler, Tara L. Writing to Learn in
Social Studies. The Social Studies 97.4 (2006): 158-160. ERIC. Web.
12 June 2010. Barone, D. The written responses of young children:
Beyond Comprehension To Story Understanding. The New Advocate, 3.1
(1990):49-56. ERIC. Web. 12 June 2010. Cress, S.W. A Sense of
Story: Interactive Journal Writing in Kindergarten. Early Childhood
Education Journal, 26.1 (1998): 13-17. antiochla.edu. Web. 12 June
2010. Crilley, Mark. Getting Students to Write Using Comics.
Teacher Librarian 37.1 (2009): 28- 31. ERIC. Web. 12 June 2010.
Knipper, Kathy J. and Timothy J. Duggan. Writing to Learn Across
the Curriculum: Tools for Comprehension in Content Area Classes.
The Reading Teacher 59.5 (2006): 462-470. ERIC. Web. 12 June 2010.
Mohr, Marian M., Courtney Rogers, Betsy Sanford, Mary Ann Nocerino,
Marion S. MacLean, and Shelia Clawson. Teacher Research for Better
Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004. Print. 49-56.
Cress, S.W. (1998, Fall). A sense of story: Interactive journal
writing in kindergarten. Early Childhood Education Journal, 26(1),
13-17. Knipper, Kathy J., Duggan, Timothy J.(2006) Writing to learn
across the curriculum: Tools for comprehension in content area
classes. International Reading Association, 462-470
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Vocabulary Learned- Poster Created from Wordle.net (Thank you
Lorraine!)