A Flavor of Teaching Strategies

Instructor: Celena Larkey, 10 am -12:00

After the keynote, we came back to TC to join a smaller group to focus on a specific grade. I chose to participate in “first-grade” group. Recalling my own writing experiences during all my formative years in China, I felt that the first grade was one of the two crucial moments in my life for learning writing: (1) the time when I began to learn to write as a first grader, and (2) the “bottleneck” period when I was full of emotions but lack of systematic techniques to write. The R&W approaches for first grade here will further illuminate the ways of English teaching for students in big cities in China who take English as a second language from kindergarten, and may also shed light on the approaches of teaching Chinese literacy. Though English and Chinese are two languages having extreme differences, I believe, the concept of being a writer, a fair number of teaching strategies and learning principles, can be shared and co-discussed.

*What is good writing?

The Best Story

Celena asked us what should be the good writing for our students. I wrote down the key words given by peers: confidence, connection, choice, relaxed environment, organized, etc. Before perceiving the answer at the end of this week (the end of the writing institute), I’d like to add more thoughts:

The joys of writing first come from choices. For younger children, especially those who just begin to write, it is not appropriate to give them many restrictions. Let’s forget about connection, paragraph, and grammar. Let’s just write for fun, for something they feel interested, meaningful, and/or something which can help them create a wonderland in their mind. Free writing gives more options for imagination and creativity.

Every child has a palette in his/her mind. They use a mind brush to paint on the palette. How can we as teachers add colors to the teaching of writing? It is our responsibility to elicit their imaginations and guide them to "paint" their beautiful images via texts, pictures, music, and/or other possible media formats.

* Teacher as adult writer

Celena also told us that we would spend about 40 minutes per day this week to practice adult’s writing, to experience ourselves as adult writers. I jotted down ideas for possible topics: my first successful writing experience, my grandma’s brave stories, a story for my beloved, a poem for an only child, etc. I finally decided to write about my grandma's brave expedition in the 1940s, which I will blog about in the later entries.

* The use of "timeline"

The “timeline” here as consulted with Celena is about mapping the ideas you want to use for writing. It can be about breaking up a big idea into small ideas, or selecting special moments within a small idea.