NINE! Ten! 13!!

I really liked the idea of taking something that you have previously written about and turning it into a poem. I feel like poetry tends to be something very difficult to get started with. I know I always had trouble coming up with something to write about whenever we had to write poetry in school. I thought it was very creative to write about something like the noise that overalls make in the dryer. I thought she made a really good point about how poetry does not have to be about something deep and profound. It is way too hard to write a poem that encompasses "all of nature" as she said in the book. To me, writing a poem about a very simple, every day thing like the washer/dryer is much more appealing and much more realistic.
Chapter 10 kind of got on my nerves. Obviously I don't know this author, and I do feel like she has a lot of good ideas, but I felt like she just kept insisting that her ways and methods are vital to a classroom and that the way she does it is the best way but people just aren't doing it. I understand why it's good and I don't mean to say that I wouldn't like having a writer's workshop in my classroom, but this just seems like a very extreme version of it. Maybe I'm totally wrong about that - I've never really heard or thought much about a writer's workshop before so maybe this really would be the way it was, but it seems really intense to me.
I don't understand what a focus lesson is.

Writer's Workshop

All throughout elementary school I absolutely loved to read. I didn't ever particularly care about writing though. I didn't dislike it in school, but I would never have chosen to write outside of school over choosing to read. I am one of those people that Katie Wood Ray described in the book - "many, many adults will define themselves as 'readers' but not 'writers'." Her explanation for why that is probably pretty correct.

Another reason I didn't particularly care for writing was because the way it was presented in school was never all that pleasant. I remember never being too enamored with the "writing process". It always really took the fun out of it and made me feel like the more important part was closely following the steps, not the actual writing. The system was too rigid and made the experience less authentic.

The system described at the very beginning of the first chapter sounded very unfamiliar to me. I cannot imagine the 4th grade class I am in now having this kind of freedom of interaction. However, I felt like I may have seen some parts of a first grade version of this scene in my placement last semester. They had the chance to write and share for an allotted amount of time every single day. They could write about whatever they wanted and share their ideas with their classmates. This was definitely helping them expand their knowledge of language and helping them learn a lot.

I wonder if this would be considered integration of subjects. They are definitely expanding their language arts skills as they practice writing. Does this mean that it does not fit this description of a writer's workshop? Something that really stuck out to me from the reading was the description of the difference between being and doing writing. I hadn't thought of it this way before, but she described very well the importance of spending time just writing and nothing else. Also, she made many good points about emphasizing why it is important. This is definitely introducing a concept that I had not previously given a lot of thought to. I am glad to be able to learn about this now from this book and class. I'm not very sophisticated with technology, so I hope this will help me learn a lot in that department as well.