Music To The Rescue

In a past life I was a musician and a music teacher.  While I lacked the talent and drive to become a professional musician, music has always been something I've enjoyed.In our classroom, when students need to complete a transition from one activity to the other - for example, universal breakfast clean up to Morning Meeting - we play music. We began the year with Pachelbel and are working on Bach at the moment.My students love to talk - usually to me and all at once -  they talk a LOT. And while I understand and encourage this as part of their processing and language acquisition, it can get pretty loud. When we're in Writing Workshop, there are definitely times I want them talking out loud, but there are times when I'd like them "talking" with their pencils and pens.One day this week, as I was preparing to release my students to their writing tasks, I started explaining to them that I would like to begin experimenting with background music during Writing Workshop.  As I write - even now - we have classical music playing in the background so why not?  This was, as many things about teaching are, unplanned.It was not an instant success -- it took a couple of starts before I could convince my students that they didn't need to try to talk over the music. But over the course of the last three days, the background conversations - the ones that were not about writing - have been replaced so that Writing Workshop is most definitely a more focused work period.Yesterday, one of my friends approached me in amazement saying "we wrote quietly the whole time!" And so they did.  Music to the rescue.

Writers' Notebooks Revisited

Struggling with teaching writing is nothing new for me. I myself struggle with writing - the process, the ideas, the whole of it I'm afraid. And here's an admission (omission?) of guilt: I have never kept a writers' notebook.Our district is committed to implementing Units of Study by Lucy Calkins - whose ideas I do admire and respect. In my struggles to incorporate "Lucy" into "Amy" interpretations of what I'm doing and what to do next are frequently garbled. I need to make sense out of this in my own way.One of the things I've struggled with the past few months is Writers' Notebooks. Originally I tried to get kids to jot down ideas - observations or snippets of a storyline that might be turned into something more significant at a later time. Lately, I've been teaching students a the strategies that Lucy Calkins outlines for generating narrative writing ideas.Being more direct in teaching strategies for ideas seemed to be working. Kids were recording ideas and then focusing the idea for later development. Everything seemed to be humming. Or was it really? The transfer from notebook to draft was not very seamless.This past weekend I found a book by Aimee Buckner call Notebook Know How.  I'm sure I'm probably the last person on the planet to discover this gem, but on the off-chance that you haven't read it, do it. Now.In my rush to get a Writers' Notebook into my students' hands, I forgot something:

A notebook can become whatever the writer makes it to be.  As teachers, we can guide its use, present strategies,  and even mandate entries if we wish. If the notebook is to be useful, however, it must be useful to the writer first, and the reader (teacher) second.

Here's exactly what I have lost sight of! In my rush to get kids to use a writers' notebook I haven't provided them with any background for why writers use notebooks, nor any strategies for developing the notebook into a personal tool for each developing author.So for the first time, I am going to keep my own Writers' Notebook in hopes that I, too,  can learn right along with my students. We will become authors together.