Writing to Learn

These After reading activities help students integrate, elaborate, and apply the information and knowledge acquired from the reading. In class we discussed the different strategies that prompted these kinds of connections. These strategies are broken into 3 main categories formal, informal, and creative.

We talked about informal last class, so this week we focused on formal and creative. These strategies include activities such as essays, research papers, diamantes, cinquains, and sense poems. There are many more strategies but these are the ones I like the most. Each of these strategies gets students thinking about the different elements and ingredients that went into making the text. I know from experience that when I sat down to write a paper new ideas that had not been discussed in class suddenly became all too clear to me. I hope that when I begin my teaching career that I can get students to see what they were not shown. 

I particularly like the creative strategies. I feel that these strategies would force a student to think deeper about a subject or element presented in the reading. The student would have to own part of the text and connect to that element on a much deeper level to be able to write about it creatively. 

As teachers, we need to help students fill in the gaps between the texts and the world while keeping it concise. After strategies help students elaborate and internalize ideas and concepts presented in the text.