Lori announces the next task, which is to create sentences by studying the chart.
This provides students opportunities to compose at the sentence level and to use many of the high- frequency words they encounter regularly in text (e.g., the, of, and, in). They elaborate their descriptions of what they see, giving them practice using accurate verbs, adverbs, and adjectives and providing Lori with opportunities to expand their syntax and knowledge of the English language and how it works.
In their first PWIM cycle, Lori models making sentences for the students. She begins with a category containing just two items: building and stone pillars. Lori shares her thinking as she works. “I thought I would just begin with the relationship—
what the pillars do for the building. So, I started with ‘The building sits on tall stone pillars.’ Notice that I focused on one of the unique characteristics of the building.
I began my sentence with the word The; it is a very useful word. When you are reading silently, notice how many times it is used on a couple of pages in your book. I choose the word sits because that seemed to be what the building is doing, perched on the pillars. Actually, I think it’s more accurate to say the building is rest-ing on the pillars: sittrest-ing or perchrest-ing sounds as if it might get up and leave. Let’s change the sentence to ‘The building rests on tall stone pillars.’ I added the words tall and stone to tell the reader both how the pillars looked and something about what they are made of. I started to wonder why the building is on pillars. . . .”
Lori models composing another sentence and then asks her students to make some of their own. She says that studying the photograph and/ or building on a word category may help get a sentence started because the words often are all about the same topic or action.
The students look at their groups of words and begin to compose their sen-tences. Over several sessions they generate and share them. Lori writes them on a chart, and they read the list together as sentences are added. She also adds some new words to the original PWIM chart and puts them on word cards that she dis-tributes for students to add to their word banks.
We can easily see the importance of certain useful words as her students com-pose. There is such a word as it appears in nine of the first 26 sentences:
“There is a reflection on the water.”
“There are leaves floating in the water.”
Forms of the “to be” verb and several prepositions appear: in, on, of. Some com-pound and complex sentences also appear:
“Two elephants with tusks stand near a waterhole; both are drinking water.”
When Lori has the students read the whole list of sentences, the quantity of prose in them exceeds the amount that several of them have ever read in one
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sitting. Importantly, they are starting to sense progress, even this early in their first PWIM cycle.
phase Iv: Making titles
Next, Lori gives them the assignment of developing titles for the picture: “I want you to make a title that captures what is there. Imagine that someone had the title and then came in here, where we have lots of big photographs, and could go straight to this photograph. Read through our sentences and see what comes to mind.”
In a couple of days, Lori gathers the class into a circle and asks each person to contribute a title. A variety of titles appear, providing students with even more text to read. Here’s a sample:
“The Two Elephants”
“A Big Drink of Water”
“The Mystery House on Stilts”
“The Water Hole”
“Elephants at the Water Hole”
Lori then asks her students to identify sentences that could fit under one of those titles.
John offers, “These elephants seem really big.”
Mary says, “Their trunks are like giant gray straws.”
Sarah muses, “Is that round building on pillars to keep those big elephants out?”
And so we get some more ideas— and sentences to read!
phase v: Classifying sentences
Lori’s printer hums again and sentence strips appear. “Now, I need you to read the sentences carefully— several times, not just once. And think about their attributes.
You can think about their topic, such as what information they contain or about how they are written. Look carefully at them. Then classify them into categories, just as you did the words.”
Lori illustrates by putting these two sentences together and sharing her reasoning:
Behind the elephants there are bushes and brown grass.
Elephants live in grasslands in Africa.
“I put these together because one describes where African elephants live in general and the other one describes something about their habitat, the environ-ment where these two actually live. So they have some content in common. Some categories might have how they are written in common.” Figure 5.10 displays one of the student categories.
The students work at home and a few minutes each day in class. When she judges that everybody has a couple of categories they can share and explain, Lori gathers them into their work circle.
Josh says, “I put numbers 5, 12, and 17 together because they all say some-thing about the water.”
Niento says, “I put numbers 2, 4, 12, and 16 together. Something is happening in all of them.”
And the sharing continues. Some categories contain descriptions of the ele-phants and others deal with the flowers. The students learn that some sentences end up in several categories where different attributes are emphasized. Now, just like categories of words led to the writing of sentences, content categories of sen-tences lead to the writing of paragraphs.
Note that reading and writing are being learned together. Words are recog-nized because of how they are spelled, and knowing how to spell them is a funda-mental part of writing. Writing sentences provides material to read. Writing paragraphs will provide more passages to read. The print language flows from the already developed listening– speaking vocabularies of the students, building the
Students make categories with sentence strips FIgure 5.10
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new form, print, from the previously developed language. New vocabulary and concepts are added as students explore answers to their questions, such as
“Where is this? What kind of elephants are these? What are those buildings for?
What kind of building is that?” and so on.
phase vI: Composing— From sentences to paragraphs
In the past, Lori’s students have barely been able to write legibly, let alone gener-ate a coherent paragraph. By the end of the year, she expects them to be writing short essays and stories, but right now we have arrived at the first formal lesson on composing beyond the sentence level. Figure 5.11 shows Lori during this lesson in which she uses the PWIM chart, the sentences that students generated, one of the sentence categories, and a paragraph she has composed.
“We’re going to build paragraphs using our sentences and the photograph.
First, I will model how to write a paragraph.
“I have looked through the sentences and put together a category of all the things that happen around this watering hole, that gives me sentences 1, 2, 5, 12, 16, 17, and 27. I had in mind the title, ‘The Watering Hole.’ Then I took ideas from the sentences, made some of my own, and here is my paragraph.” Lori reads it to them.
The picture word chart, the list of sentences, Lori, and a paragraph
FIgure 5.11
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reflections
The watering hole is a gathering place for African elephants. These enormous creatures set off ripples in the water as they use their trunks to drink. Water lilies grow in clusters along the water’s edge. Large floating leaves surround the perfect pink flowers. Reflected in the water, the elephants and the flowers mingle in the ripples.
After she has read her paragraph, Lori does a composing think- aloud (see Figure 5.12) and discusses which sentences she used, how she put them together, and how and why she made modifications or additions.
“Now I want to talk to you about what I was thinking as I wrote the paragraph.
I hope it will help you as you think through what you write.
“Let’s begin with the title. I put all these sentences in one category because they described things that were occurring at the waterhole, so I thought a good title would be ‘The Watering Hole.’ And, in my first sentence I wanted to introduce my reader to the place and what was present.
“I changed the word elephant in the second sentence to enormous creatures to add something more than just repeating elephant. In the third sentence, I added
Lori’s paragraph for her composing think- aloud FIgure 5.12
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in clusters to our sentence about water lilies growing because it described the groups of flowers near the water’s edge and what we learned about how water lilies grow.
“In my fourth sentence, I wanted to provide more detail about the water lilies, so I used information from our sentences 1, 12, and 27. I decided to change ‘pretty pink flowers’ from one of the sentences to ‘perfect pink flowers’ because the lily I can see the best looks so delicate and perfect. Also, I wanted to keep the sound—
the alliteration from the consonant sound / p/ at the beginning of each word— of perfect and pink together.
“One of my favorite things about this picture is the reflection in the water. So in my last sentence I wanted to talk about reflections. I used sentences 2, 5, and 17 and combined the information to make my last sentence. Because I liked the way the reflections mixed or blended in the water, I decided to use the word mingle to represent that mixture. I also hoped my reader would think about the contrast of the delicate flowers mixing with the leathery elephants in the reflections.
“My first title was ‘The Water Hole,’ then I changed it to ‘Reflections.’ Now, I am thinking about changing it to Reflections at the Watering Hole to identify the place and because to me the reflections are a special part of what I noticed when I studied the photograph and thought about what we had said in some of the sentences. That happens sometimes— you get a new idea or clarify one as you write.
“Now, take one of your categories of sentences. Think about what you might say and what title you might use. We will use our writing time each day until you have a whole paragraph. Each day, you’ll have a few minutes to share your thinking about what you want your readers to take away and what you are doing as a writer.”
In sum
This PWIM cycle lasts about three weeks. The students study the words and Lori watches their progress. They read and write— just reading their paragraphs will be as much as reading some short books! By the end of the cycle, each student will have acquired about 30 sight words and some new ways of identifying words. Lori is teaching them to print more legibly and has started teaching them cursive writ-ing, which will affect their writing fluency considerably. This year these students will, on average, gain 2.0 GLE— it will be as if they had been in school for two years compared to the national average gain and will be four times the gain any of them made in a previous year.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
As their fourth week with Lori begins, she presents students with the photo-graph in Figure 5.13 and says, “Last month we visited Africa, this month we . . .”
As they break for recess, the students will notice that, now, a number of books on farms around the world have appeared in the classroom collection. Thus, Phase I of a new cycle begins.