RM Winter 2017

that simply modeling effective writing practices does not guarantee students will generalize and respond accordingly. They need a lot of practice and support along the way. Benefits of participating in the project. Participating in this study project provided third graders with the opportunity to grow as both a reader and a writer, and it helped us develop as educators. We were able to learn a third grader’s point of view through the responses each week, viewing the story from a different perspective. Their authentic writings allowed us to develop a better understanding of the ways third graders interact with and process text. It also allowed us to see the types of connections they made. After a while, we were able to anticipate the questions that they would ask and the connections that they might make. This was extremely beneficial to us as future educators, because it showed how to ask the right questions in order to gauge student understanding and comprehension. In our course work, we learned about writing instruction and the need to plan and implement instruction based on the needs of our students. This project gave us the chance to really practice that. Each of the third graders were given the freedom to respond however they wanted and we were able to see their work, challenge them to think critically, and talk positively about reading. This required us to reflect on the student’s strengths and needs in order to respond. We learned about the essential components of writing, textual connections, and the various types of inferential and literal questions. Further, we learned first-hand the importance of individualized instruction for students. We were able to link the instruction from our university coursework on student development to real-life student work. We learned that teaching students about textual connections and inferential questions are essential skills in developing our students’ writing. We discovered that teaching students how to write about textual connections can help them generalize this skill to reading comprehension and higher order thinking by taking the book’s content further than literal interpretation. This experience has taught us how to intentionally and appropriately support student learning in both reading and writing. Considerations for Designing Authentic Literacy Experiences Based on the variety of experiences detailed above, we offer some considerations for teachers interested in designing authentic preservice and elementary literacy experiences. • Make it manageable. Start small! Mrs. White dedicated twenty minutes a day to the project. She taught a few new skills and reinforced skills already taught through authentic learning experiences, and she was able to meet the needs of her students. This project started with one class of third graders and only went for seven weeks. This was manageable for the third grade class and also for the preservice teachers as well. They could easily commit to seven weeks of reading and an additional week of responding and visiting.

conclusions and make different connections. Not knowing what our pen pals would pull out of the text was exciting and something we looked forward to throughout the project. It gave us practice adjusting our writing style to the reader and showed how thinking and writing skills develop over time. For each of the chapter responses, we used our pen pals’ writing to guide our responses. If our students focused on a certain event in the book, our response would also include a reaction to that event as well. We used this technique in order to validate their ideas and perspectives. We also designed our responses with the intention of developing our pen pals’ critical thinking skills. For example, we modeled making personal, textual and worldly connections, as well as, provided essential questions about the chapter in order to extend our pan pals’ thought processes. See Figure 7 for examples of preservice teacher entries. Many of us observed that as the project progressed our pen pals’ writing increased in length and included more varied types of responses. Figure 7. Sample pre-service teacher entries. Pen pal book study figures 10 Figure 7.

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Creating responses prove challenging at times. For example, we have not had many opportunities to observe the features of third grade writing. This made responding difficult because we were not always sure if the errors appearing in our pen pals’ writing were age appropriate. Further, we were unsure about the amount of feedback (positive and constructive) we should provide. We wanted to focus on the positive aspects of the students’ responses in order to encourage them to continue writing. Therefore, we focused on the content of our pen pals’ responses, and indirectly suggested improvements for their future responses. As a result, another take away was

Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 | scira.org | 35 |

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