Classroom Close Up: E.L.A. Throughout the Day
Making Students into Better Writers with Madeline Noonan

[01:00:09;15]
Madeline: "I love that for your hook, you..."

Crystal: What I was doing during the writing period was checking my writing to get ready to publish it.

Madeline: "Add one more word here, just to give it an extra umph."

Crystal: She read it, and if like, if I did have a mistake or something, she wound up telling me and I have to figure out and see what I can write instead of the mistake.

Madeline: "Let's see where we left off. OK, we left off right here. 'So the went to see the house. No one can stop their beaming faces, and their big smiles.' Oh! Do you know which word just made me go "Oh!"?

Crystal: "Beaming."

Madeline: "Yeah, totally. I can visualize it so well. Now, when no one can stop.. I'm pretty sure that this story right now is in the past tense. Is "can" in the past tense?"

Crystal: "it's hard because um, sometimes there might be a lot of mistakes."

Madeline: "Has it already happened? Is it happening now? Or, will it happen in the future?"

Crystal: "It's happening now."

Madeline: "Yeah..."

Crystal: Then you have to re-write them again.

Madeline: "And, put this in the past tense."

Crystal: "Could."

Madeline: "Yeah. No one could stop. So again, here..."

Crystal: And, when we edit, and it's all good, and we get permission, we start publishing. That's the writing where we don't have any mistakes in it.

Madeline: "Do you see something you want to fix there?"

Crystal: "Yeah."

Madeline: Crystal's a particulary strong writer

"A wonderful, ripe, orange pumpkin"

She was writing with phenomenal language and great figurative language. So, anytime I saw that, I really wanted to highlight and celebrate that.

" 'She got so scared that her eyes went as wide as an owl.' The similies in this are so awesome. She went..."

What I identified as her two focus areas were one, that she has a lot of simple sentences that could be combined to make complex sentences, and the sound of her writing becomes a lot richer.

" 'When they went to the kitchen, they found a wonderful, ripe..' We're gonna...'orange pumpkin. When the tour was over...' Do you see something you want to change about that, just from the way it sounds? It sounds a little bit abrupt again, just like it did up here, and we combined those two simple sentences. Can we do that here as well?"

Crystal: "Yeah. I think this should be a comma."

Madeline: "Good. And, since that's a comma, what happens to this capital letter now?"

Crystal: "Lower case."

Madeline: "Beautiful."

The second part was that she was continually beginning sentences with the word "so".

"Do you notice what word we're seeing again anda again in how we start it?"

Crystal: "So."

Madeline: "Yeah. So, do we.... So (laughter) do we need the word "so" here?"

Crystal: "No."

Madeline: "It's redundant."

We always frame that the student is an author.

"As an author, what would you like to add in?"

Crystal: "Although."

Madeline: Really validate that they've created a piece, and it's special to them, and it's not easy to do.

"It sounds like they were wondering about the pumpkin. So, I'm gonna let you add..."

Crystal: "Curious."

Madeline: "So, I'm gonna add a new sentence here. I'm gonna let you, as an author, when you go back to your seat, sort of decide what exactly the sentence is gonna sound like."

They have practice with editing skills they can now use independently, and it also feels less critical and more constructive.

Crystal's growth this year has been incredible.

"Comma, so they did."

At the beginning of the year, her writing was really basic; it used a lot of dead words. What you see now is she's writing multi-paragraph compositions; she's using figurative language. I'm incredibly proud. She's just a phenomenal worker.

" 'The house was perfect as pumpkin pie.' I love the similie. 'It had marble counters, a hot tub, and all the amazing, eye-popping, mind-exploding things you can think of.' You're bowling me over. This story is fabulous, and ..."

Crystal: In the beginning of the year, my writing was just like a list, and didn't have any fun, or creative things in it.

Madeline: "I'm excited to read the next half when you're done self-editing."

Crystal: And, now I, since I've learned more things, my writing been more creative and fun.

Interviewer: And do you like it better now?

Crystal: Yeah. I like it better, because it's not like, boring. I'll probably want to read it more than once.