3BEES

Welcome to 3Bees Blog! 
Where expressions are free, for you and for me.  
We will take you on an exciting journey,
Where you can learn plenty from what we have learnt about Literacy.
Everything you need to know is right here, you will see.
So come and share your feelings, opinions and suggestions because at 3BEES expressions are always free!

Created By: Shaquillle Aldonza, Jina Jonas & Leah Giman-Satoute 

Links to Similar blogs:

https://litchiclbd.wordpress.com/

https://missionwriters.blogspot.com

The Day That I Almost Died 

Descriptive Piece

Below is my self-produced digital story.  In this podcast, I will be providing you with a reading of one of my pieces of writing.  This piece was written as a sample essay to be included in my writing portfolio.  I really enjoyed making this digital story, so I hope that you enjoy listening to what's in there.  

Enjoy! 

Shaquille Aldonza

Being Patriotic!

          

This blog is designed in the form of a podcast and speaks about showing love for one's identity and nationality. The entry takes specific interest in teaching individuals, especially younger children, some of the ways in which they can be appreciative of their country, Saint Lucia. The children have seen other nations take pride and dignity in their homeland in different television shows. Hence, just as other nations do- we shall do. 

Hit the play button and enjoy!

Entry by: Jina Jonas
Podcast was completed on Friday 13th December 2019

Leah's Digital Story Writing - Incorporating ICT in Language Art

This was more than a task.  It was about developing a skill that would make my language arts class more innovating and make learning fun and exciting for my students.  I cannot say that it did not drive me up a wall, however, I am happy with my finished product.  Teachers are skeptic in embracing change and developing with this new age but upon discovering how students in this era learn we will come to cherish how technology helps us meet our goals in developing students’ interests and attitudes to one that loves reading and writing.

Here is my digital story below.  Story written by me - Leah Giman-Satoute.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tFzyAwz0a5kYK2YFUEvkEFia87O1gIBO/view?usp=sharing

Microteaching - The Writing Process

What is it worth to have knowledge which is never applied?  This microteaching phase of ths course have us the opportunity to bridge the gap between theory and practice by planning and delivering a mini lesson on one stage of the writing process.  In pairs, we executed lessons on descriptive and narrative writing.  This process was the most important and beneficial aspect of this course as we were preparing for life in the writing classroom.  It was during this phase that we realized our weaknesses and strengths as teachers of writing.  Our execution, choice of words, activities and transitions were all dissected to by the lecturer and our peers, to give us tips on improving our craft and encouragement to continue displaying the positive factors.  

While it was an opportunity to gain advice for improvement, it was also a chance to build a bank of activities for each stage of the writing process.  This was possible because each peer engaged students in at least two activities which can be used at each stage of the process.  Consequently, we were able to begin conceptualizing the way we would deliver writing instruction in future classrooms.  

For this reason, we would like to say thank you to everyone who participated in this activity as you have helped in developing us into better teachers of writing.  

Written by: Shaquille Aldonza, Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute 

Poetry

                                Limerick

There once was a guy name Danny
Who lived uptown with his granny                                                     
He had a big waist 
And such good taste 
That he married the pretty girl name Annie.

                                Cinquain

                          Beach 

                    Quiet      Calm 

   Bathing        Relaxing        Playing 

                 It's the place to be

                           Fun 


How did you feel after reading the two pieces above?  Would you be interested in writing if this was what teachers expected from you as a writer?  
Now that you have considered your feelings, take a second to imagine how a child would feel about writing if they are introduced to it using these pieces.  Unfortunately, the perception that most students have of writing is that it is a long and mundane process.  They often see it as something that is frustrating, as teachers are always 'nagging' about their Vocabulary, Grammar, Spelling, Phonics and other conventions of writing.  Such occurrences perpetuates the negative views of writing, as early as the infant grades.  However, every teacher holds the cure to this issue, in the form of poetry.  

Poetry is literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas are given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.  In this definition, we can see that poetry not only encompasses literary work, but it also emphasizes the need for freedom of expression and ideas.  This component of writing is often lost when teachers engage students in writing instruction as they usually determine students' topics, sequence and styles of writing.  With poetry, the students can divulge their feelings and ideas in the absence of strict conventions and a teacher's expectations.  This will allow students to feel the need to put their ideas on paper as poetry accepts everything that they have to say.  Upon the completion of writing their poems, teachers should then give students the opportunities to entertain their peers by reciting, publishing and performing their work.  

Not only can poetry be used as an intriguing way to develop students' love for writing, but it can also be used to teach students the different conventions of writing, while their remain entertain and interested.  In poems like the haiku and the cinquain, teachers can teach students about syllables and the continuous tense of verbs, respectively.  Furthermore, areas like rhyming, word families and adjectives can also be taught using poetry.  This will develop a sense of interest and motivation for students to learn such aspects of writing, as it is done in context, rather than in isolation. 

When students have developed the love and willingness to put pen to paper through poetry, we can then introduce students to other forms of expression through writing.  These will take the form of the different genres of writing: descriptive writing, narrative writing, exposition and argumentative writing.  

One may argue that every genre of writing allows students to be expressive and therefore question the need for poetry.  While every genre indeed caters to expression, poetry provides the most welcoming, interesting, expressive and entertaining platform for writing, and our students love to entertain and be entertained.  This was made clear to us as the lecturer did an outstanding job at allowing us to see the importance of poetry through various interesting activities.  For this reason, our suggestion to every teacher, is to incorporate poetry into your writing classroom, and contemplate introducing writing through this genre.  



Written by: Shaquille Aldonza, Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute 

Planning for Descriptive Writing Instruction

As stated by Robert John Meehan, well prepared and engaging teacher is a catalyst and spark that creates the desire to learn in our students.  To be a well prepared and engaging teacher, we must appreciate and engage in through lesson planning to create a roadmap for students and ourselves.  For this reason, our lecturer veered away from teaching writing, to engaging us in formulating lesson plans for writing instruction.  Considering the fact that every genre of writing requires variations in the planning process, we started by focusing on one planning for descriptive writing.  

Similarly to the writing lessons, the lecturer began the lesson planning instruction by involving us in planning a lesson, collectively.  The first course of action during this phase was to identify our topic and expectations for students.  This allowed us to start visualizing the destination that we want to take our students to, thus contemplating the objectives and activities that they need to achieve to arrive at that point.  Despite the fact that we have been consistently writing lesson plans for instruction in various subject areas, planning for this descriptive lesson was slightly different from the what are accustomed to.  While some persons felt that we were steering away from the topic by seemingly focusing on adjectives during the lesson, others believed that the transitioning from cognitive to psychomotor objectives was a bit slow.  

As we continued with the planning of this descriptive lesson, the lecturer gradually released responsibility to us by allowing different groups to formulate appropriate introductions for the lesson, based on the intentions and objectives which were initially identified.  After sharing ideas and deciding on a few suitable introductions, the groups came together as a class to share their work, which was constructively criticized by other individuals.  

This entire activity proved to be quite interesting and meaningful to us because it cleared a misconception for us and provided insight on how to plan writing instruction through the writing process, albeit for one genre of writing.  Furthermore, it also gave us the opportunity to gather various objectives, activities and introductions which can be used to teach this one genre of writing, thus facilitating differentiation in the writing classroom. 

Moving foward, we suggest that the lecturer continues to involve us in the lesson planning process in the different genres of writing.  Not only will this result in us becoming better lesson planners, but it will also equip us with a multitude of ideas to build a bank of interesting activites to utilize on teaching practice and throughout our teaching careers in the writing classroom. 

In the link below, you can find information pertaining to descriptive writing.  This includes the purpose, reasons for teaching it, how to teach it and two videos which identify activities to use when teaching this genre of writing.  We encourage you to take some time to peruse through the contents of the link to hopefully learn something new.  

Enjoy! 

https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing

A Recall of Facts at L-I-T Class!

Preview
The engrossing words from the lecturer as the silence of the class listened to both familiar and unknown facts about descriptive writing, shook the creative juices in our expired brains. The otherwise stagnant "kwas" got activated as the lesson swiftly unfolded that day. Every well-connected detail: sharing prerequisites about descriptive writing, studying kernel sentences, creating five senses clusters, learning the transitional words and phrases, was rather rightly digested.  

Opinion

The belief that infants are only able to produce kernel sentences is definitely a myth. Modelling to students how to improve a descriptive piece with the use of several pieces of vague writing will help improve their writing skills. The students are only capable of reproducing what we as their literacy teachers model in class. Since, teachers have adopted more of a drilling technique to teaching the infants, students will grow up with the view of producing work in one set format, which is whatever they learned in their previous grades. The infants are not blank slates- allow them to freely speak about pictures with their outrageous imaginations added to whatever can clearly be seen.

Fact 

• The main purpose of descriptive writing is to describe or provide details about a person, place, event or thing, so that a vivid picture can be formed in the readers' minds. The writing of a descriptive piece involves the use of the five senses - hear, sight, smell, touch/ feel and taste. In doing such, it is important to make students see that their story or passage has become more interesting and engaging after including the descriptive words and phrases.  

• The teacher of literacy can adopt different classroom strategies and approaches in helping students develop 'healthy' descriptive passages. Some of these strategies include writer's workshop, RAFT, read-write-pair-share and guided writing practice. As mentioned above, it is necessary to model to students the steps in the writing process when teaching writing. (look at video below)

• Engaging students in descriptive writing helps to build their vocabulary and speech deliveries. It can also improve their overall writing skills as they will be exposed to ways of being creative with their words in the use of figurative language. Students will learn to use metaphors, exaggerations, adverbial phrases and adjectival phrases to make their writing more interesting and original. 

• It is also important to note that a good descriptive piece of writing is very organized. For example, the use of transitional words and phrases of time, place and order of importance. In the description of a person, one would start with physical appearance and move to personality and then behaviour. 

• Descriptive writing can be incorporated across the curriculum in the different content areas. For instance, students in Grade One can orally describe for a Social Studies lesson, the buildings in their community or their experience at the La Marguerite Flower Festival.

Entry by Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute & Shaquille Aldonza

Class Links

https://weeklytamiro.blogspot.com

https://missionwriters.blogspot.com/

https://litchiclbd.wordpress.com/

https://slayingtan.blogspot.com

https://litreflections102.blogspot.com

https://tech-savvywriters3.blogspot.com

Poetry - Limerick 

The Day I was "Frass"

I was doing a blog in class

But I was looking at the grass

I swore I was home

But I wasn't on my own

And I realized I was "Frass"

I brought my knees to the floor

'Cuz I couldn't get to the door

I crawled my way through

Made it to my Doudou

And had him begging for more

The Writing Process - Narrative Writing 

How can we teach our students how to write a narrative piece?

 

   This was the question which was posed to us by the lecturer at the beginning of the lesson.  While we knew that teachers are to use the writing process to deliver writing instruction, we were not knowledgeable of the strategies which can be used to instruct at each stage.  This situation was swiftly rectified as she introduced us to story mapping: an effective strategy that one can use during the pre-writing stage. 

    The first course of action was to provide us with a narrative piece which was written at a grade five level.  From this piece, we went through the components of the story map and extracted the contents which corresponded with each element of a story, before placing it in the story map.  This was one of the aspects that we liked because it gave us the opportunity to break a story into its bare essentials (elements) to understand how the writer constructed his piece.  Furthermore, it also provided the experience needed to guide our future students through this same process.

   To allow us to gain a more thorough firsthand experience of the way that the strategy can be used at that stage, the lecturer taught a mini lesson using story mapping.  This was quite meaningful as we were able to observe the manner in which she progressed through the lesson and involved the students in the process.  As she commenced the lesson, the lecturer immediately established that she and the students would be writing a story as a class.  This was particularly interesting to us as the norm is usually to brainstorm with students but allow them to write their stories independently.  In light of this, we were able to attain a more effective means of beginning instruction of story writing and also clear up our pre-existing misconception of the way it should be done.  We agreed that this style of teaching writing will provide students with first-hand experience in integrating the individual elements of a story into cohesive paragraphs, to form an events rich and readable piece.
     Considering the knowledge that we accumulated throughout the lesson, we recommend that the lecturer continues the development of the last lesson to show the transition from where we concluded.  We believe that we can develop into more competent teachers of writing if we continue to experience mini lessons at each stage of the writing process.  This will allow us to see what is expected from us at each stage and how we can guide the students development while working in the various stages.  Finally, we suggest that she exposes us to a variety of effective activities which can be used during instruction at each stage, in an attempt to differentiate the instruction to meet the needs of our different learners. 
      To provide our viewers with a clearer picture of what transpired in the lesson, we have embedded a video below.  From this video you can gain a practical example of how a teacher uses story mapping (Bubble Diagram) as an activity during the pre-writing stage of the writing process.  This video is quite similar to the events which took place during the LIT 102 session last week.  This will allow you to better understand the events of our last lesson.  More importantly, it serves as a guide to help you learn how to incorporate story mapping into your writing lesson.

                                                       

Group Entry: Shaquille Aldonza, Jina Jonas & Leah Giman-Satoute 

Modelling - A teaching tool

It is one thing to know what to teach but another thing to execute a lesson effectively in literacy.  One of the most exciting part of our LIT course is having our lecturer teach mini lessons where the class pretends to be a different grade per mini lesson and she acts as that particular grade teacher.  We had exposed our low level of self esteem with regard to teaching literacy from last semester and so we requested that she model to us good teaching practices.  This proved to be very helpful.  We are able to see the lessons unfold from introduction to conclusion and this creates a more meaningful approach to teaching.

Our final class for the week was very interactive.  In this class we pretended to be grade 3 students and  likewise our lecturer pretended to be a grade 3 teacher.  She modelled writing the first draft from the story map she had outlined from the previous class.  We had also outlined our own story map in pairs using her model as a guide, which we used to write our narratives.  Towards the end of the class, each pair read aloud their stories.  These stories reflected the fabulous job done by our lecturer in teaching us narrative writing.

The modelling process

Modelling is one of the most effective strategies used in teaching.  It is an appeal to students for imitation.  According to a recent research review of teaching practices that increases students engagement in Preventing School Failure:  Alternative Education for Children and Youth, the writers revealed that while many desired academic and social behaviors are abstract concepts for students, when teachers model using explicit examples, they reduce student confusion and enhance understanding.  Modeling is a twofold process that includes demonstrating a desired skill or behavior while describing the actions and decisions being made throughout the process.  It is a very interactive process because it makes concepts accessible to the learners through structured, guided practice and reflecting learning and also because it increases on-task behaviour.  Research has found that modeling decreases student error, positively affects the perceived importance of a task and increases self-regulated learning.  For effective modeling, teachers should use think-alouds to make important connections and share their expert thinking with their students.   

As we continue our LIT course on the different types of writing and becoming effective in teaching those genres of writing, we would recommend that our lecturer continue modelling as we believe that it is a very effective strategy which is helping us become exceptional in the teaching of Literacy.  We would also advise current teachers as well as future teachers to use the modelling process not just in literacy but across the curriculum.  It is a process that has been proven to work as witnessed personally.  

Our lecturer models narrative writing.

Written by Shaquille Aldonza, Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute