|
Steve Peha: Every teacher needs a safety
net, a strategy or activity we can fall back on
when we're feeling unsure of ourselves. For Julie,
it was the Draw-Label-Caption strategy, a simple
Pre-writing exercise that everyone can feel
successful with. But Julie did more with DLC than
most teachers do with it. She developed it over
time into a powerful tool for her kids. She also
used it to ground herself in the management of her
Writer's Workshop.
Draw-Label-Caption
Julie Bumgardner: My safety net was the
Draw-Label-Caption strategy because it was easy
for the kids; students at any level could do it in
some form or another. Knowing that I had something
rich and authentic to do that everyone could be
successful with made me feel more comfortable and
helped the kids build confidence. It also gave me
a way of teaching them about Writer's Workshop and
the writing process right at the beginning of the
year before any of us felt very confident. Using
Draw-Label-Caption, every student could be an
active participant in all parts of the workshop:
we could learn to share and to give constructive
feedback, we could talk about different stages of
the writing process, I could teach them about our
workshop procedures, and as we were doing this,
they could build their confidence about writing,
and I could build my confidence about running a
Writer's Workshop.
Steve: I got the idea for
Draw-Label-Caption from a workshop I attended
where a teacher shared some ideas about teaching
caption writing as an authentic writing form. I
had never thought of teaching kids to write
captions but this teacher had so many interesting
perspectives on it and the results she got were
amazing. I added the labeling because it seemed
like a perfect transitional task for younger kids
who were experimenting with single words but
hadn't quite found their way to writing sentences.
As you point out, one of the advantages of this
strategy is that every kid can do it well. I've
even used it with pre-schoolers. But the most
interesting thing for me is seeing how well it
works with older kids and even adult writers. As
you mention below, the act of choosing a focus for
one's writing is very important. And this strategy
seems to be ideal for helping writers of all ages
and abilities solve this problem.
Finding the Focus
Julie: To introduce the strategy, I started
by talking about why a writer would want to use
it. I talked about how figuring out what your
ideas are, and finding a focus for your writing,
is just as important and, in fact, as necessary as
the writing itself. I told the kids that the
picture they draw for Draw-Label-Caption is like
stopping to take a photograph of a moment. One
scene of a memory, of all that happened during a
time you're thinking of, captured as if you'd
taken a picture of it. We stuck with that analogy
because it seemed to make sense to everyone.
I told the kids that when you take a picture with
a camera, you have to have a main thing that
you're taking a picture of and it has to be in
focus. If you're swinging your camera around or
walking along trying to take a picture while
you're still moving, what's going to happen? You
will have a blurry picture. Nobody will be able to
tell what it is a picture of. In a similar sense,
If you stand too far away from what you want to
take a picture of, you won't really know what the
picture's all about because there will be too much
stuff in it. And if you get too close, there's not
enough background so it's hard to understand how
the thing you're taking the picture of goes with
the other things around it.
Steve: Photographic analogies are very
common in the teaching of writing, but you did
something here that I hadn't thought of. I'm
always telling kids to focus their writing but I
never do it as thoroughly and as thoughtfully as
you did in this case. In one lesson, you touched
on three common problems all writers experience:
(1) In your analogy about the "blurry"
writing that results from "swinging the camera
around" you're addressing the problem of kids
jumping quickly from one topic to another.
(2) When you talk about "standing too far
away" and having too many things in the "shot",
you're helping kids understand effective depth
of detail.
(3) And in your last comment you're
tackling one of the toughest things I've ever
tried to explain to kids: the notion that
readers need some context for a story (or
"background" as you put it) in order to
understand it.
In the past, I had always thought of
Draw-Label-Caption as a simple pre-writing
strategy, just a warm-up really. But you've taken
it further and turned it into a great strategy for
detail.
Julie: Helping them understand the camera
analogy was one thing, helping them create a
picture that would serve as an effective
representation of their experience was another. I
had to use many techniques. For example, someone
drew about holding their new kitten for the first
time, but then just draws a large picture of a
cat. I felt that there was more going on, so I
asked the student, "If I was there watching this
happen and I had a camera, what would I have
snapped a picture of? A big cat? Or would you have
been there too?"
In another case, we did a shared writing about
scoring a goal in a soccer game. I acted out an
example of what it would look like. I went through
the steps of kicking the ball, stopping at regular
intervals to ask if this picture would be
different than the previous one, to show them how
many scenes there might be in just one experience.
Then I did a quick sketch on the board of me
standing next to the ball smiling and asked if
this would be a good drawing to show what had
happened. They laughed and said, "No! You have to
draw you kicking it, and put the goal net in
there."
Steve: You mention here that one challenge
is helping kids understand that a single "event"
is often comprised of individual "scenes". I'm
often surprised that so many "TV generation" kids
don't realize this but perhaps they just don't
have a term in their vocabulary to describe it. If
you think about it, a "story" is just a set of
"scenes" and each scene is really just another
Draw-Label-Caption. So, by putting several DLCs
together, one for each scene in their story, even
very young writers can develop fairly complex
narratives, and take them all the way through the
writing process.
Draw
Julie: After picking a topic, everyone does
a sketch. It took a mini-lesson to explain that
this is not the same as an illustration or a
picture. We don't use color and we don't spend a
long time drawing each piece. We use stick figures
to represent people and animals. In the sketch we
draw everything that is a part of the experience
including the background and other objects that
might have been around: an end table, their
cousin, the garden they were standing in front of;
it all goes in, it's all a part of the experience:
where you are, when you were there, what was
around, etc.
Steve: Doing the mini-lesson on the
difference between illustration and sketching is
really valuable because it ends up saving so much
time. I have also found that starting with a rough
pencil sketch helps me make an analogy between
"pre-drawing" and "pre-writing". I tell the kids
to use only pencils and not to do any shading or
texture or fine detail. Of course they want to use
all their colored markers and pens so I tell them
they will get to do that later, during the
publishing stage, when I will help them take their
rough sketches and turn them into finished
illustrations.
Label
Julie: The next step is interesting because
even though the kids really get into it, for some
it takes a little prodding; they don't seem to
know that it's ok to write all over their sketch!
The idea is to label absolutely everything in the
picture from the grass, to their new shoes, to the
cat, etc. They use lines to connect their label
with the things they are labeling, they write all
over their sketch, left to right, up and down,
sideways, whatever works for them. I had some kids
who ran with this. I had a few really low kids who
could hardly write a word. One boy ended up
labeling three things using sound spelling ("me",
"dad", and "wtr" for "water") and he worked as
hard on those three things as the kid next to him
did on his 20 things. And that's one of the great
things about this strategy. Anybody can do it
successfully. And when they're done, they have a
focused idea.
Steve: At one point in my work, labeling
saved my life. I was stuck where every primary
teacher gets stuck: trying to help kids move from
drawing pictures to writing words. I was having
kids draw and then tell me what their pictures
were about. Then, as soon as they said something
like "I am playing with my Dad." I would ask them
to write that down. And they would just stare back
blankly wondering why what they'd just done wasn't
good enough for me. It would take me months to get
kids from the "picture only" stage to "picture and
text" stage. Then I tried labeling. As soon as I
modeled it, the kids loved it. I let them share
each time they put in one or two more labels.
Then, after they'd labeled most of the things in
the scene, I showed them how they could write a
sentence using the labels they had already written
and a few "Word Wall" words (like "the", "is",
"and", etc.) to string it all together.
For me, this was a good example of how one simple
change in my teaching could cause a dramatic
change in student achievement. Five years ago, it
would have taken me most of the school year to
help a group of kindergartners write their first
sentences — and a few
wouldn't have done it until 1st grade. Now I can
do it by the end of September with most kids, even
traditionally low performing students and second
language learners can get to this point in just a
few months.
There's also an important secondary benefit to
this kind of rapid growth in writing: kids learn
how to read. Writing requires all the skills of
reading so it's not surprising that shortly after
kids become comfortable writing their first
sentences, they begin to start reading sentences,
too. For me, the implications of this are
profound. If we know that we can teach all
students to write in sentences by the end of
kindergarten, then we know they can also become
independent readers in the same time frame — a
full year ahead of most developmental benchmarks.
Caption
Julie: The last part is to write a caption
for their sketch, one sentence that tells what is
happening. Once again, we had to have a
mini-lesson about this. "Does 'I like cats' tell
what's happening in a picture in which you are
being handed the kitten that is your new pet?' No,
they said. How about "My mom is handing me my new
kitten"?
This, once again, came easily to some but proved
more difficult for others. One girl drew an
elaborate sketch of the outside of a hospital with
a car driving in the parking lot of the emergency
room and with the headlights on showing that it
was night. She told me about the experience of
crying in the backseat with a broken arm as her
sister held her and her mom turned in and pulled
up to the emergency room doors. She seemed to have
a solid grasp on the scene and her focus. But when
she wrote the caption it read, "I fell off the
monkey bars." It took a while for me to help her
understand that that caption belonged to a
different scene. I, of course, gave her the option
of doing a new sketch to go along with that
caption if that was what she wanted as her focus,
but she wanted to work with the scene she had
drawn. She eventually worked out a great caption
that really told what was going on in her sketch.
Steve: The anecdote about the girl with the
broken arm is a great example of an effective
conference. For me, having a student's picture to
work with dramatically improves both the
efficiency and effectiveness of my conferencing. I
used to spend the first few minutes of every
conference trying to figure what the kid was
doing. Often they didn't know themselves, so we
were both a little lost. Now, with the picture in
front of us, we've got something tangible to work
with. Regardless of which strategies the kids have
used, I insist now that they have some pre-writing
materials for me when we conference.
I also liked how you gave the writer the option of
drawing a new picture for the caption or of
revising the caption to fit the picture she had
already drawn, and then letting the writer decide.
Either approach would have been profitable for
this writer but the best part is that she gets to
make the decision herself. Even though I see this
happen all the time now in classrooms where I work
regularly, I'm still amazed that such small
children can make legitimate editorial decisions
like this. To me, this is one of the most
important developmental benchmarks for a writer,
one that unfortunately has never been thoroughly
researched and that our testing systems don't
adequately validate.
After learning about writing captions from another
teacher, and experimenting with it a bit in my own
teaching, I have been surprised at how rich it is.
I have done lessons on all traits of writing using
captions as the form. It is especially good for
lessons on Word Choice and Sentence Fluency. But
best of all are the lessons on Conventions that I
can do when we're working on captions. Because
we're usually working with just a sentence or two
at the most, it is well within the abilities of
all writers to take full responsibility for all
corrections in pursuit of producing writing that
is 100% conventionally correct. Often, the first
publishing I have kids do is the publishing of a
caption. And if I'm working with a group of kids
who really struggle with conventions, we do a lot
of publishing of very short authentic forms.
Putting it All Together
Julie: What seemed at first to be a fairly
simple strategy, turned out to be much deeper and
more complex. We ended up doing several
mini-lessons on different things in order for
everyone to get comfortable with it and to be
successful. Many of these lessons involved shared
writing. I would draw sketches on the board and we
would test out different captions together. The
students had to choose which one I should put with
my sketch in order to have the sentence really be
about the sketch. Eventually, I decided to use the
time we were spending on this strategy to teach
them about the writing process as well. To
accomplish this, we took a topic and used
Draw-Label-Caption as a way of going all the way
from pre-writing to publishing which they
fulfilled by producing a colored illustration and
re-copying their caption in their best handwriting
after having edited it for conventions. Though we
spent more time on this strategy than I had
planned, I concluded that it was time well spent.
The kids seemed to need this time, and a trip
through the writing process with it, to really
understand how it worked. And I think I needed it,
too. |
