With a wealth of digital resources, students at Park Avenue Memorial Elementary School are becoming better readers and writers.
Fifth grade teacher Lisa Zomback ensures that her students do plenty of writing in their digital notebooks to build their literacy and story-telling skills. They write about a variety of topics and also explore different types of prose.
Recently, Ms. Zomback’s young writers completed their “small moments” stories in which they reflected on happy memories. The digital notebooks, which are done in Google Docs, are shared with the teacher, so she can go in, read their work and make comments. She will also conduct one-on-one, socially distant writing conferences with her students because the discussion helps them flesh out their ideas. A writing assignment is never complete on the first try as editing and revising are important parts of the process.
Julie Kirschen, a third grade teacher, makes use of several digital tools for Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop activities. She creates interactive lessons with Google Slides, which can be viewed by students learning in person and remotely. They keep writing notebooks using Google Docs and reflect on their reading and writing by making Flipgrid videos.
Discussion remains an important part of any literacy lesson, and technology helps foster that in a hybrid learning model, with students in a class participating simultaneously in instruction from school and home. During their daily Google Meet sessions, Ms. Kirschen’s students analyze books, review different literary elements and discuss writing strategies.
Reading and writing are intertwined, as the books students read serve as models for their own writing, whether it is helping them build their vocabulary or showing them a style they want to emulate. When Ms. Kirschen’s students worked on writing strong endings for their own stories, they discussed examples of good endings from books they have read.