Prioritizing New Facts and Generative Grammar! Plus Bonus Audio!

This week we have been meeting in new book groups.  Some 2nd Graders read into Into the Ocean by Brenda Z. Guiberson.  To keep track of what they were learning from this fascinating book, the kids used sticky notes to write down interesting new facts. Then as a group we talked about which of those facts were most interesting.  Each student had a different criterion for what made their facts more important. Some thought facts relating to how turtles are endangered were the most noteworthy while others prioritized information about their life cycle.  Above, Owen shares his thoughts on the facts he chose to highlight.

We are also doing a quick poetry study and have had so much fun creating our versions of Sheila Hamanaka's book I Look Like a Girl.  The book has a repeated line structure that we are using  to build our own poems.  After we get some basic lines down, we will go back and revise them.  What's most interesting is how our young writers are extending their simple sentences with participle phrases.  For instance, Adam, whose poem you can listen to below, takes his line "I look like a boy but really I'm a coral reef," and turns it into "I look like a boy but really I'm a coral reef bursting with life."


If you are interested in some of the teaching theory behind this kind of approach to writing,  there is some interesting research from the National Writing Project about the use of prominent feature analysis.  This is basically looking at effective writing and teasing apart the specific grammatical strategies a writer uses to build their piece.  Dry as it sounds, this is kind of revolutionary: it helped me see that grammar and writing are most effectively taught as a set of tools to use and not as a set of rules to follow.  Poetry is an especially effective way to expose kids to grammatical tools and have them practice in a highly motivating context. So, with this poem, we are looking at one kind of free modifier (that "bursting with life" part of Adam's line) and how it helps us complicate and stretch a simple declarative sentence. Of course, our young writers are focused on creating their poem (not on the technical application of final free modifiers to create structural complexity on the sentence level), but it is the borrowed structure that allows them to put it all together.  Fascinating to watch it happen!