Slide 1
Strengthening the Range of
Solving in Writing
A Reading Recovery
Study Session
Leslie McBane 2016
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Slide 2
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“Usually the gain is not that the
child gets a particular word right
but that he has strengthened the
range of solving new words he will
use in the future.”
LLDI, Part II, p. 61
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Slide 3
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“There is a lot to be learned about
writing down a language. When
you teach the child how to attend
to new features on his own, or how
to engage in a new type of analysis
on his own, then that ‘knowing
how to do it’ can be applied to
hundreds of new instances.”
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LLDI, Part two, p. 61
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Slide 4
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Questions to Ponder
• What are critical writing teaching and
learning goals?
• How can we support flexibility? How can
we hinder?
• What does reciprocity in problem solving
look like?
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Slide 5
Writing is about: (for the child)
• Spelling and also about composing!
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– Shifting from simple sentences to complex
sentences and also about using a variety of
ways to structure sentences
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LLDI, Part II, p. 50
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Slide 6
Writing is about: (for the child)
• Building a known body of words and also
about constructing words from their parts
– Fast recognition,
– Slower recall, or
– Thoughtful construction
(COT 16)
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Slide 7
Writing is about: (for the teacher)
• Getting the child to compose and write his
own stories
• Governing the difficulty level of the task
• Demonstrating word construction
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Slide 8
Writing is about: (for the teacher)
• Telling, directing, demonstrating, praising,
confirming
• Making deliberate teaching decisions that
increase accessibility to the task
• Supporting the child’s performance
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LLDI, Part II, pp. 50-53.
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Slide 9
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ACTIVITY ONE:
BRAINSTORM
With a neighbor or two, list and describe all
the ways a child might solve a word he/she
wants to write.
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Slide 10
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ACTIVITY TWO:
CHANGE OVER TIME
Compare I and III under Writing a story or
message on page 50 of LLDI, Part 1. What do
you notice?
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Slide 11
ACTIVITY THREE:
HRSW
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What do you notice between OS and RATK
10? Between RATK and week 5?
•How did this happen?
•What are the implications?
•What words are written correctly?
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Slide 12
ACTIVITY FOUR:
EARLY LEARNING
•What words do you think were learned or taken to
fluency?
•What words were put in boxes?
•What words did the teacher choose to write?
•What analogies were used?
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Slide 13
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Early Learninghigh teacher
contribution;
sound boxes,
learning words
Mid Learninglearning how
Teacher
reminds,
prompts,
facilitates the
production
Late Learning”The child
should be
trying to solve
words in a
variety of
ways by
himself
supported by
the teacher”
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Slide 14
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Learning Words
• Scale of Knowing
– from being new,
– to only just known,
– to working to get a solution,
– to easily produced but easily thrown,
– to a well-known old response in most contexts,
– and later, known in any variant form
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Slide 15
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Remember!
– “Words gather information around them.”
– “Knowing many different words enlarges
one’s chances of getting to new words.”
– “Children can too easily be drilled into
expecting regularity.”
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COT 23, 24.
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Slide 16
How can we support thoughtful
solving early?
•Attend to what types of words
we choose for the child to learn
•Establish the task in HRSW
•Demonstrate!!!
•Share the pen
•Prompt for visual AND sound
analysis
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Slide 17
“As each child learns
more about writing it is
as if he or she were
putting the same jigsaw
together but solving it in
different ways.”
COT, p. 15
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versus a set of
directions!
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Slide 18
Ways to Hinder flexibility early
•
•
•
•
•
Alter the message
Learn only “high frequency words”
Take over the task of HRSW
Do all solving via sound analysis
Work on everything
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Slide 19
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ACTIVITY FIVE:
MID-LEARNING
•What words do you think were learned
or taken to fluency?
•What words were put in boxes?
•What words did the teacher choose to
write?
•What analogies were used?
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Slide 20
How can we support thoughtful
solving in mid learning?
•Mind your default
•Mind the child’s default
•Keep learning sound regular and
sound irregular words
•Prompt carefully
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Slide 21
Ways to Hinder flexibility mid
•
•
•
•
•
Learn few if any multi-syllable words
Learn only sound regular words
Keep asking “what do you hear?”
Stay in sound boxes
Accept simple sentences
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Slide 22
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ACTIVITY SIX:
LATE LEARNING
•Level of complexity?
: •Level of independence?
•How were words solved and which
were known?
•Teacher’s role?
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Slide 23
How can we support thoughtful
solving late in a child’s lessons?
•Open ended questions
•Conversation
•Increase the demand to write more
•Monitor teaching moves carefully
•Still be prepared to show and tell
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Slide 24
Ways to Hinder flexibility late
• Monitor for the child
• Get in the way of problem solving
• Talk too much
• Avoid stories that carry over multiple days
• Stick to the same genre
• Quit increasing the writing
vocabulary
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Slide 25
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RECIPROCITY: THE MISSING LINK
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The reciprocal nature of
strategic action
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Slide 26
Taking liberties with a quote:
“Reading Recovery children have lessons
directed to making them constructive-to
actively process information, to find and relate
information from different sources, to bring it
together, construct a decision, and monitor
the effectiveness of that decision. The child
should feel that he is a [writer], not just a
‘rememberer.’
LLDI, Part ii, p. 101.
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Slide 27
Early Strategic Action:
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• Directional movement
• Finding the words
• Locating known words or letters in continuous
text
• Locating an unknown word
• Prompt towards ways to remember words
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What counterparts do these actions have in
writing?
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Slide 28
Checking on oneself or selfmonitoring:
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“I like the way you did that”
“Where is the hard bit?”
“Why did you stop?”
“What did you notice?”
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Slide 29
Checking on oneself or selfmonitoring:
• “You tried to work that out. That was good.”
• “What do you expect to see at the
beginning?”
• “Check it carefully”
• “Think carefully before you start and write it
here.”
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Slide 30
Searching for information
• “You said…Can we say it that way?”
• “Does it look right?”
• “What’s wrong with this?”
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Slide 31
Searching for information
• “Say the word aloud. Say it slowly. Is that like a
word you know?”
• “You can say another word like that.”
• “Have you heard another word like that?”
• “Have you heard another word that sounds
like that?”
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Slide 32
In conclusion:
• Fostering flexibility requires flexible prompting
(to a variety of ways of doing and thinking).
• Time can make us hasty in our decision
making and can keep us from being
thoughtful.
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Slide 33
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• Valuing the partially correct requires allowing
the child to take the initiative.
• It’s not the number of words as much as the
difference in types of words.
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Slide 34
“Observation studies reveal a young [writer]
who works very actively on the information in
texts. What makes him more able to do this
without assistance (independently) is being
able to initiate or call up a range of different
strategies over which he has a flexible
control.”
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BL 292
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