A visit to a primary school English class at Inventure will find our “writers” hard at work as they edit their genre specific writing. It’s a QUIET TIME where the teacher moves around conferring and helping students like a wise friend who shares her knowledge of writing. Surprised! This is exactly what we do at our writing workshops, which focuses on writing as a task that is broken down into specific strategies that are shared with students. We at Inventure believe that reading and writing are the vehicles that help us to learn about the world, to be transported to places and lives we may never really see. We write to communicate, to tell our stories, to appreciate and commend, to fight and argue, to persuade and inform.
To develop writing skills that capture our inner thoughts and help us express our imagination at Inventure Academy we have adopted the Writing workshop methodology of Dr. Lucy Calkins who is the founder and director of the Reading and Writing Project, a research and staff development organization housed in Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA. Gita Varadarajan, a graduate student of this program, works with our teachers to guide them through the workshop architecture. For teachers this process has been groundbreaking, as they understood the concept of a minilesson and the effectiveness of student’s writing over a sustained period of time. We all started with the expected “It’s not possible” to acknowledging how it is possible and transformational for students and teachers alike.
For me personally it has been a learning curve that helped me understand the structure of teaching genre writing and helped me grow as a teacher and lead teacher of English instruction. Working with the RW program has helped to address all the elements of balanced literacy – writing, reading, vocabulary and phonics, read aloud and shared reading. As we approach our next Publishing Day for ‘How to books’ the sense of anticipation and expectation is palpable and seeing their work being published is the greatest reward for our budding writers.
This year students at Inventure will explore their creativity and evolve into more mature writers as they explore different genres such as writing manuals and procedural books (How to books); personal narratives (small moments); essays (persuasive essay / letter writing); realistic fiction and non-fiction writing (All about books).
The writing workshop provides an environment where students are provided a choice of topics to write about, write for various reasons, learn by examining the works of mentors, and are provided time to go through the writing process. The teacher teaches by showing what good writing looks like, writing alongside the students, going through the process with them, scaffolding her young writers along the way.
The “How to book”module of the RW program that celebrated their publishing week recentlywas well received by parents and students alike who were amazed at the prodigious increase in the quality and quantity of student writing.Language and effective communication is the corner stone of success and we believe that this is a vital twenty first century skill that we endeavor to instill in our young “writers.” Ms.Sowmya Narayanan
Head of the English Department.
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