Synopses & Reviews
Coming to Know is a book for teachers who are ready to put writing to work across the curriculum. It is written by teachers of grades 3 through 6 who, dissatisfied with encyclopedia-based approaches to content-area writing, asked their students to write as scientists, historians, mathematicians, and literary critics do - to use writing-as-process to discover meaning.
One of the subjects of this volume is report writing and ways to help children produce content-area writing that is as personal and meaningful as their stories of their own experiences. Students learn how to take notes in their own words, conduct interviews, record observations, design their first simple research project, select appropriate genres for their research, and apply the techniques of writing workshop in science, social studies, and reading classes.
In addition, Coming to Know explores the uses of academic journals, or learning logs. Children speculate, brainstorm, role play, correspond, predict, and ask questions about math, reading, science, and social studies - and demonstrate the power of informal writing to generate thinking. Coming to Know is also about the connections between reading and writing, the effects of using writing to learn on curriculum and planning, and the role of children's literature in teaching science, social studies and math.
Synopsis
Coming to Know is a book for teachers who are ready to put writing to work across the curriculum.
About the Author
Nancie Atwell is one of the most highly respected educators in the U.S. Her classic In the Middle, now in its third edition, has inspired generations of teachers. Visit Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle for exclusive blogs from Nancie about the third edition. Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School takes you inside her school to see what innovations have made the biggest impact on learning schoolwide, while her DVDs Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle give us a seat in her writing and reading workshops to see firsthand how she helps students become independent, sophisticated readers and writers. Nancie is also the author of classroom materials through Firsthand. Lessons that Change Writers is a year's worth of instruction straight from Nancie's file cabinets, while Naming the World helps teachers jumpstart their literacy teaching each day the way Nancie does - with poetry, the mother genre. Nancie taught seventh- and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K - 8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. Nancie was recently named 2010 Teacher of the Year by River of Words; a California-based non-profit educational organization and also received an honorary degree from the University of New Hampshire during its 2011 commencement ceremony. Read Nancie's Education Week article in which she makes the case for literature in the core standards. To see and hear Nancie's response to the NY Times article on the place of student choice in reading, click here. Read the Article »
Table of Contents
Researching and Reporting
Beginning Researchers, Donna Maxim
Bridging the Gap, Patricia J. Collins
The Power of Learning Logs
Thinking and Writing in Learning Logs, Anne Thompson
Learning Logs in the Upper Elementary Grades, Marcia Blake
How Learning Logs Change Teaching, Nancy Chard
Knitting Writing: The Double-Entry Journal, Charlene Loughlin Vaughan
In the Schema of Things, Laura Farnsworth
Letters to a Math Teacher, Anne Thompson
Reading and Writing
Writing Informally About Reading, Janine Pierpont
Whether You Eat the Vegetables or Not, Jo Anne Lee
A Love of Books, Donna Maxim
Teaching and Learning
Showing the Way: Using Journal Writing to Develop Learning and Teaching Strategies, Nancy S. Wheeler
A Puffin Is a Bird, I Think, Jo Haney
Taking Charge of Curriculum, Cindy Greenleaf
Appendices
A. Genres for Report Writing
B. Prompts for Learning Log Entries
C. Bury Yourself in Books: Children's Literature for Content-Area Study, Donna Maxim
D. Resources for Writing and Reading to Learn