My Way or the Highway!

Oracy and writing are two fundamental skills that I feel students must learn and have a firm grasp on.  These two skills are used in day to day life, and communication is extremely important for any interaction.  It is important that a teacher does not simply just teach these two skills, but makes it enjoyable to children so they will be inclined to engage in using their skills and want to learn more.  The key to this is having a balanced program.  This is something that I have really taken away from this class.  A balanced program is a program that engages students in many different ways, and helps to cater different learners.

Oracy is paramount in helping children develop literacy skills and social competence.  Thus, it is very important that we incorporate oracy into our teaching, and that we help students with it.  Teaching oracy requires many things.  Having a close personal relationship with each student is vital.  This allows time for one on one interaction and a chance to challenge students to talk, think, and explore their knowledge of the world.  A teacher should almost always ask open ended questions as this will help students make meaning.  We must provide every student adequate time to answer, even though there can be that awkward silence.  A teacher must cultivate and promote a safe environment where students are safe to share their ideas/thoughts, but also to question; creating respectful listeners goes hand in hand with this.  Beyond the teacher-student interactions, it is important to promote structured partner and small group talk.  This can be done through some different strategies such as the garden party, or tea party strategy.  Collaborative work is an excellent way to promote oracy.  It is important for students to have the chance to vocalize their ideas and thoughts, and this will lead to more dynamic writers.  The use of drama within ELA would be a fantastic way to help children explore literary works but through the use of role playing and dialogue.  Drama is not just a fine art, it is an excellent cross-curriculum tool that can strongly promote and teach children oracy skills.  Creating podcasts would be a great outlet for students to practice their oracy skills.  Students could record stories they have read or written, they could share information on a particular topic, or it could be an interview with someone.  The options are almost endless for this and it would be a great tool for teaching oracy.  Listening is a key component to oracy as well, but I am not going to dwell on this.  There are many other ways to help with teaching and improving oracy skills, so these are just a few of the many different strategies.

For developing writing skills and trying to create dynamic writers, there are many strategies.  One of the most important things for writing is giving the students time, which is not always that easy.  A form of free or informal writing is very important.  This gives students the chance to write down many different ideas, thoughts, and feelings.  From this students, with the help of peers and teacher, will be able to make meaning and explore their ideas further.  All in all, what this is stressing is we need to allow students the chance to simply write and experiment without being assessed or restricted by any rigid and strict writing structures and rules.  Students also need time to reflect, reshape, and redraft their pieces of writing.  Having students work once on a piece of writing is not conducive to creating dynamic writers.  The ability to go back to older pieces of work allows students a chance to edit (very important in the writing process) and solve problems within their work, perhaps after consulting peers or the teacher.  Collaborative work and/or writing conferences are very important.  Not only does this promote oracy, but it allows students to lean on others for support and to gain more insight into ideas and thoughts.  It makes a child’s inner speech explicit, and from this a deeper understanding of writing and ideas can occur.  Speaking about the writing process needs to be permitted and ample time should be set aside for this.  Certainly what I have learned from all this has been that to teach writing effectively, a lot of informal writing and peer/teacher conferences are very important.  There are many other ways to teach writing, but these two ways I feel are very key.

I look forward to taking some of the many strategies we have learned in to my classes, and hopefully it will lead to children who are not only strong in oracy and writing, but also find enjoyment in them.  I envision in my classroom that I am able to give the students lots of time to write and interact with one another to help enhance oracy and to help with the writing process.  On the wall there should be visually stimulating work that helps students with the writing process.  There will also be displays of students’ works.  Although not focussed upon, there would also be some things up around the room to help students with writing conventions.  Overall, beside the numerous strategies taken out of this class, the biggest thing is that balance seems to be the key!

Not much has changed since my first blog, besides I now have many different tools and strategies to help teach, strengthen, and promote oracy and writing skills.  The biggest change is probably seeing the need to promote free writing, and that writing conventions are even less important.