How can we encourage young learners to become confident writers? It’s a question every elementary classroom teacher continues to ponder. In this episode of Literacy Talks, writing takes center stage as our hosts explore how to rethink writing workshop strategy and transform it so students can build a solid foundation for writing—from the basics of letter formation to the creativity that comes from expressing and communicating ideas. Like early reading instruction, early writing instruction benefits from explicit, systematic methods, with writing skills developing in tandem with reading. If you’re looking for effective ideas for building writing skills as part of everyday literacy instruction, this episode will give you a wealth of ideas and inspiration.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
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How can we encourage young learners to become confident writers? It’s a question every elementary classroom teacher continues to ponder. In this episode of Literacy Talks, writing takes center stage as our hosts explore how to rethink writing workshop strategy and transform it so students can build a solid foundation for writing—from the basics of letter formation to the creativity that comes from expressing and communicating ideas. Like early reading instruction, early writing instruction benefits from explicit, systematic methods, with writing skills developing in tandem with reading. If you’re looking for effective ideas for building writing skills as part of everyday literacy instruction, this episode will give you a wealth of ideas and inspiration.
Subscribe to our Literacy Talks podcast digest and never miss an episode! We’ll send you summaries of every session, links to the resources discussed on each show, and some extra goodies so that your learning never stops.
Subscribe to our podcast digest.
Download the new Reading Horizons Discovery Product Guide.
Access the show notes.
Read the transcripts.
Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to Literacy Talks, a podcast series from Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us all improve our professional practice knowledge and confidence in teaching reading. Our host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor at Reading Horizons, where reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, and author, speaker and elementary teacher. Today's episode takes a fresh look at writing instruction to explore how we can take the ideas that sparked writing workshop methods and rethink them to make writing instruction systematic, explicit and even more successful. Let's get started.
Stacy Hurst:Hello, and welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst. I'm the host and I'm joined by
Lindsay Kemeny:Thank you. Okay, so, um, this comes from a Donell Pons. And Lindsay Kemeny, as I am every week, and we love comment, Stacy that you actually made and one of our podcast to discuss all things literacy. So today, Lindsay is going to episodes Oh, I don't know, last season sometime, where you just lead our discussion. And I will let you introduce the topic, Lindsay. made this quick comment about, you know, how you used to do writing workshop. And but now you know, better and you do
Stacy Hurst:Sounds like a great topic. And you did Texas last things a little differently. And so that might be a little surprising to people, I just thought maybe we can expand on that a little bit. And to start, you know, maybe explain what writing workshop is. And then we will talk about ways that we can improve on that. night and tell us what the topic was. And I just want to spend more time learning stuff. But I can't tell you my past experience. So I did do a workshop model for writing. And that entails, I will clarify, I wasn't trained in any specific type of workshop model. But they all have some things in common starts with a mini lesson. And I think, as even as I became a literacy coach, as a teacher, and a literacy coach, that was probably the most confusing part for the teacher. Because there was no explicit or systematic approach to that mini lesson. It literally was anything that could help inform their writing. So as a first grade teacher, I did things like punctuation. And then the next day, we talked about the structure of a story and characters and how you need those in your story or a setting or problem. So really, it was kind of all over the board. But then another tenant of the workshop model is to give students a significant amount of time to write. And in first grade, that recommendation was generally 20 to 30 minutes of independent writing time. And during that time, at least the way I taught the students were focusing on the elements that I taught that day in the mini lesson. And then as they were writing, I would go around and conference with each of them over there, as many as I could in that time. And we also at the end of our writing time, we had what we called author's chair, and everybody got a chance to share what they were writing. That is how I did it. How did it go? I will tell you some things. My students loved it. And I mean, they would frequently Miss recess to continue writing. However, the quality of their writing. Not that great. Even today, I look back on it and think, Oh, that was kind of wasted instructional time, even if they loved it. Right. And they were writing, but there could be so many ways that to improve on that for sure. And I think research that's been done on that kind of model supports that. But you know, as I listened to Emily Hanford 's latest podcast series, and the background of Lucy Caulkins and how that whole workshop model came to be, it made sense to me given the time that it was born in if that makes sense. But I think we we know much more now. Lindsay How I know you're the one asking the questions here but I am curious in early classroom, how did you teach writing?
Lindsay Kemeny:I did writing workshop too, originally, and sounds very is similar to yours. Definitely, there's some good things about it. I mean, it's there's, like you said, your students loved riding. So there's some great things going on. And it was the same thing kind of I do a mini lesson, I felt like I was always teaching them when I was second grade. At the time, I was always teaching about that a story has a problem in the solution and a problem solution. I felt like I taught that over and over. And then I'd have these, you know, like you said, Little consultations with the students while they're writing where they're coming up one on one by one and talking to them kind of trying to help them individually. But it was like, you know, you had a meet with everyone individually. So it seemed like it was such a gap between when they came up to you again, and then you're trying to remember what they're working on what their story is, even though we had all these little ways to take notes and things but you kind of were talking about like, there wasn't the set order or structure like a scope and sequence. So just like we talked about, we need a phonics scope and sequence, we kind of need that in writing too. And I felt like my mini lessons and writing workshop was kind of whatever was coming up. Instead of following like, I need to make sure I'm getting all these things. So it's really hard. And then when everyone is working on a different story writing all the same time, it's kind of hard. To really I feel like Teach them effectively. And and it's you can't just be getting, giving like 25 individual lessons every day in a consultation. Right. So I don't know there, there was a lot of limitations with it, I think. Donell any thoughts as we're talking about all this?
Donell Pons:Yeah, so a few things, you know, as has been pointed out, before, I work mainly with older students. But I have also been in younger grades, I have four children who are now each one of them, even though they've chosen to do different things considers him or herself a writer, which is really interesting. So I have four children and all of them and my husband who has dyslexia, I've been pretty open about the fact that he's struggled, going through school with reading and writing has found that amazing, he's I would never have dreamed that I could have children who called themselves writers, which is really interesting. And I think part of why that's happened is there has to be a certain confidence level by the individual providing the instruction, I think that's critical. That's key number one, that's what I've seen kind of lacking in some classrooms is when there is not confidence by the instructor of what is being taught about writing children and older children younger doesn't matter, sense it and they and they know so even if it's you know, we're talking first grade, there has to be a level of confidence about what it is I'm telling these young first graders about writing and what we're going to learn about writing. The other piece I think is really important is because I get students at various stages beyond those younger grades, when so supposedly they have all this stuff. It's kind of it's kind of easy to forget that there are really basic skills that come into providing a foundation for writing. So just like there's a foundation for reading, there's a foundation for writing. And some of those basic skills are just even formation of letters. Can I do that automatically, quickly? And it's it's accurate spelling of words, you know, how many words do I have my corpus that I could quickly pull out to put into something if I were to spell, you know, it's the formation of a sentence to understand what that looks like and what that means. So there are these, as you can see, I'm starting to build sort of an understanding of a base. And I get students who at any point along that way, I may have an eighth grader that still isn't great at letter formation. And that really is a problem still for being able to just jot down a short answer to something that's really tripping him up. And when you realize that that base, not only do you have to have it down, but it has to be and I'm talking automatic, and there has to be accuracy to it. Otherwise, I'm going to get tripped up before I even get to that higher level process for writing the piece that I just love. And that's the idea creation, all that good stuff. But that's much higher level thinking. And I've got a base that I've had to have to have put down before I even get to the higher level of thinking. And so I love thinking about my students and tracing back when you guys were talking about is there a great curriculum, and I think we refer to William Van Cleave before, and his program writing matters. And I've really had a deep dive into that. And we've talked about how it's for older students typically. But I like to look at the lessons and think about what would I want a student in first, second, third grade to know to be prepared to be in this lesson in fourth grade? So I often trace back from a lesson and say, what skills would that young student need to have in fourth grade in order to be highly involved in this lesson that has been presented here? So that's another way of thinking about how do I get a curriculum together? What are my students going to be responsible for in fourth grade? And are they being prepared for second third, to be ready for that lesson in fourth grade that's another way of thinking about writing too.
Lindsay Kemeny:Yeah, those foundational skills are key and I think that is a really a lot of what was missing personally when I was teaching writing workshop where we're working so much on the other side, you know, or being like, Okay, I have this writing book resource I'm using is talking about using your voice like different voices as you write and so I'm gonna get This great lesson about, you know, the different kinds of voices and like your own kind of personal, you know, character coming out in your writing, but these guys are second graders, and they don't even understand, you know, a complete sentence or a complex sentence. And we're jumping to something like voice, you know, without having those foundations. So I think that's huge. The other thought I had was like, having time to work on writing is great. I mean, you can call it writing workshop and have time to write. But the problem is that when that's like, all we do is just a little mini lesson or just a writing prompt and time to write. We are missing that explicit writing piece, which we need as well.
Stacy Hurst:Yeah, and you know, my writing, writers workshop was often disconnected from what I was teaching and reading, not always, but often. And there is a book that I learned a lot from called from talking to writing. And it's from the landmark school if you've heard of that. But I love the format of that book, because it talks about writing development happening in tandem. With reading development, well, we typically call phonics. So when you're instructing in phonics on the phoneme level, and the phoneme and the letter level, then we should be focusing on handwriting. And we're always focusing on, of course, letter formation and spelling, but then when you get to the word level, then you can start talking about vocabulary and parts of speech, right? Maybe very simplistic, and then when we're finally to the phrase or the sentence level, then we can start in our instruction, as well to inform about sentence structure, and those kinds of things in, then in our writing time, man, you could really take off with paragraphs, and then you know, going from narrative to expository text or whatever, and at that point, students are, are likely to be more competent. But I think, in the same way that we create awareness around some of those topics that are covered in the upper strand of Scarborough's reading rope, we should be creating awareness. First of some of those writing things, too, you can talk about voice a lot, when you're reading, when you you can point out these story structure elements in read alouds, or nonfiction elements of text. So there are a lot of ways to approach it. The I just felt like in my instruction, Donell talked about confidence. I don't know too many early childhood educators who have a lot of confidence in this area, which goes back to we didn't learn it in college, or before.
Donell Pons:to say, I didn't get taught this for a while. And I need the time and space and support to feel good about it. You know, I too, would like an opportunity. And I think it took a lot for teachers when I would go into classrooms to help work with teachers. And inevitably you're writing, you're talking about reading and writing together. And a lot of them after it became evident that we were working as colleagues, I had their back, this was very supportive, inevitably, and I tell you, it was the majority of educators revealed at some point that they were not comfortable with their own writing. And these are folks who had master's degrees extended degrees. And they said, that has always been a very weak spot. Something that I don't want others to know about myself is that writing is difficult. For me. It's it's hard, it's challenging. And so I always felt really good when a teacher was able to open up about that, because then we can go from there, right? We can work from there. But whenever a teacher didn't feel safe, it's really tough to help them and to support them. And so being able to build that and making it okay to say, this isn't exactly my favorite area, the thing that I love to do. The other thing that you mentioned about the voice. And Liz, you mentioned it too. And I think it's really great. And I think that we often we get our own voice from hearing another's voice first, right? And we're told stories from a very young age. And it's those oral narratives. Even if you've got a mom who's narrating her whole day, or a caregiver who's saying now we're going to set the table, let's grab the forks, let's get the knives, you're hearing another voice and the things that they're choosing to tell you that are important. And it's really important for us to hand that a narrative off to the little one, orally will be their competency on guessing first right with many, and to allow them to tell those stories to be vocal to be verbal. And if students haven't had that opportunity, then we can create opportunities for them to do that. And I love landmark. I think they're fantastic. And I've used that the verbal or narrative to to get people writing. And my number one thing whenever I teach writing and writing is one of the things I've been happy to teach in high school settings. I love it. But the first thing we start with this conversation we always start with let's have a conversation.
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Lindsay Kemeny:Think oral language is huge. And that especially in the well, I mean, really for all grades. But especially in those younger grades when the cat, they're still working on those just basic foundational writing skills and the handwriting and the motions and getting you know their thoughts on paper. But you can take that away and just have them practice orally telling a story. And that's an important foundational piece that sometimes I think we forget. And even you know, and when I was in second grade, too, and we can share specific ideas in a minute, but I would always have them read we kind of make an outline, then we're going to say it you know, say that sentence to your partner before you write it, say, you know, say it first. So that's huge. So let's get as specific as we can about ideas for writing instruction, what it should look like. Let's talk about both early elementary later Elementary. And then Don LL So I'm really curious about, you know, the adults that you work with so so let's start with early elementary any like ideas? We could be talking about handwriting ideas at the word level sentence level. Stacy, do you have anything in your in your classroom or something that you suggest now that is great for writing instruction? Well,
Stacy Hurst:that is great question because my classroom now our pre service teachers, and as Donnell is talking, and of course we pointed out, teachers don't have a lot of confidence in this area. Love my students, they have a lot of great thoughts. I also grade their essays, realize that they may not have the same skills. No wonder right. But I'm also that also provides me with the point of frustration, because I don't have a class where we can just focus on teaching writing. And I think in that space, teachers would become more confident as well. We do have methods class right before they do their student teaching. But I think we need to start sooner, right. So that being said, I'm in my own classroom, my own first grade classroom, what seemed to work well, was focusing first on formats and kind of going from simple to complex. So still on the word level, we would you know, during our writing time, label things in the classroom, and then we would create signs, and then lists and then kind of go from there. So that might be something that would help because I feel like that also helps students have a sense of authenticity about what they were writing or contributing to. And for months, in my first grade classroom, we had in the common hallway, a sign that said no smoking in the classroom, which was hilarious, because you can't smoke in the school, but that my students feel very proud that they were promoting good health. Those signs, that would just be one, one suggestion.
Lindsay Kemeny:You know, we can integrate a lot of writing just of course, some of those foundational skills in our phonics lessons. So we can review formation of letters, alphabet letters, and work on our handwriting. And then of course, our spelling when we're doing dictation and our phonics lessons, both at the word level and sentence level, that's really a great time to review and practice some of those basic skills. And then I think Stacy, you had mentioned about writing, like connecting our writing with our reading, which is something I do very different now than when I was teaching before. And so I will just take and this the sentence combining has a lot of research to support it. And I think I first read about it and the writing revolution, which is a great book. If you don't have you might want to pick up that and then also, Deb Glaser's top 10 tools talked about this strategy. And I will just take two sentences out of the, you know, the story that we are reading that day or, you know, sometimes we spend a couple of days on a story. So I will take two sentences, and sometimes I'll change them a little bit to make them nice and simple. And I'll write the two sentences up on the board. And then we read them together, and we talk about, okay, are these like adding? Is it adding a detail? Or are they like contrasting are the two sentences contrasting ideas? And if it's adding, then I'm going to give them a couple words they could use to add them like, okay, how can we combine these sentences we could say, and we could say also, you know, and give them a few suggestions. If it's contrasting ideas, then we say, Let's combine these but we can use, but we can use yet, we can use although, and then what they do is with their partner, they orally talk to each other about how they would combine the sentences, right, and it's all just verbal right now. And then we come together back together, and we share some of those ideas for adding a sentence. And that's at the simple level, you could get to a little more complex, where it's like a, you know, compare contrast type thing or, like Oh, cause and effect. So I was thinking, maybe the sentences show cause and effect, and then you're going to add because or, you know, so that's just one thing at the sentence level. And then, you know, after we've orally talked about it, and we come together, and I kind of show him on the board, how to combine them, then they're gonna get out their notebooks, and they're gonna write their favorite way to combine the sentence. So that's one thing. That's great. And then another idea I will share, and then we can go to maybe older Elementary, but I learned this from Nancy Fetzer. And if you Google her, she has a great website. And she has ideas for writing for all different ages. This can be done in kindergarten. And it's I'm trying to think it's like movie script. It's called Word masters to movie scripts. And she takes some vocabulary words, you take vocabulary words from that week, like three of them. And you're going to orally create a new story, using those vocabulary words in a different context. So it's helpful for building vocabulary is also helpful for oral language. And together as a class, you're going to build the story, you kind of have a beginning, a middle and an end. And you practice orally rehearsing the story all throughout the week. And then after they've told it several times and are comfortable with it, then, I mean, you could leave it there, if your kid kindergarten, if your first grade or second grade, then you could have them write that story. And this is really nice, because sometimes kids just don't know what to write about. And now they have a story in their head, they can change it a little bit, they can add things, but they've got that idea already. And then they can just write it down. So those are two kind of, I guess, favorite things that I like to do for writing in the early elementary grades
Stacy Hurst:I wrote every day in front of my students. And I think thinking aloud as you're doing that is helpful too. And we would also collectively did we call it I always got these two terms, confused, shared writing, or interactive writing, I don't remember. But we would create something together as a class, of course, they're speaking verbally, I'm writing it down. So they're seeing it in print. And then we would emphasize elements that we were focusing on in our phonics instruction, or in our writing instruction, too. And that's one of the things we've had another episode about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I learned that in a balanced literacy context, but I think there's still a lot of value to that activity. Yeah,
Lindsay Kemeny:I do that too. And I, we will write it all together, we compose it together, and I write it up on the board. And then I choose someone who's going to be kind of the scribe, and they're going to write rewrite it on a piece of paper, and I choose someone else to be the illustrator. And then I put them on one of those big construction papers, you know, and then we just throughout the week, we'll build to our story and then staple it together. And then they can like, read that when they want when they have free time. And that's, that's fine. Yeah, that's a great thing.
Stacy Hurst:And having a daily journal that everybody you know, the each for each student, one thing I would do is just stamp the date stamp on their pages. And it was a really nice progression from the beginning of the year to the end, and you can just see that time stamp on it, how much progress they've made, and so modeling that and then providing them time to write even if it's just writing in a journal right, what happened today, what did we do in school? Okay,
Lindsay Kemeny:what about like specific ideas for later Elementary? How should you know? Should that be very different than early elementary and how any thoughts on that?
Donell Pons:Oh, I was just going to add maybe a little bit to to the early grades that one of the supports that you can have for students who are say the handwriting piece is difficult, being able to spell is difficult. And so oftentimes It was whatever we were going to talk about for that day, would have on sticky notes, some of the options that we were going to discuss, I didn't have to write them, but they could put them in the right order. So they could organize a sentence, take it apart and lots of fun creating different sentences. And then maybe they were responsible to write one of those sentences to get some handwriting practice. Then also, we decided to color code, some of them so that if we taught maybe what a subject is, all the subject options were color coded one color. So the students were then also bringing in some of the information they had learned about a part of speech to that sentence. So there are ways to deepen and widen the experience for students who are in different levels as well. And then clearly, you get to decide that as a teacher, and I always think one of the most important things to do as the teacher is to also look around and see the effort that's being expended to be able to participate at the same level as the rest of the students, and then figure out ways for that student to be able to have the creative level, because you know, they can reach that same creative level, but what can I do to help support so that they don't get tired, and, and drag down, where you see them putting their head down on the desk, and deciding this is just too hard. When really, if I just removed a bit of a barrier, that student might stay engaged. So just kind of thinking about that, as you guys have these great ideas and suggestions for writing in those lower grades. And then I would say that continues on into those upper grades. The other piece is there always has to be room in any classroom, for student to be able to say, you know, I don't know what this is, even though you think they should know. And so I see that really nicely in William Van Cleves when he's opening up a conversation, there's room to talk about. Yeah, we have a subject here, we'll clear on subject Is everybody clear on what that subject is? And guess what you're gonna have the students tell him what do we know about a subject and that kind of thing. Of course, at that stage, I'm sure William Van Cleave is sure that most of the students do know what a subject is, but what a nice review. And then for those students who are unclear, to get a few words about what that might be. So always making room for that and your classroom, that it's okay not to know, maybe what aspect of this that we're discussing or something you thought I should have known. So I think that always needs to be at play too. And we're, we're teaching writing. But I would say that the number one thing that I see happening for students is there's no joy in it. And the joy has been taken out of writing for many different reasons. And it can either be because you struggled with those basic skills, and you were allowed to struggle for too long. So you weren't able to get to the higher level enjoyment, or also, and or the students were often confined to what they could write. So they got prompt heavy very quickly. And you'll find that that happens later to that, right, it becomes the thing you do to prove what you're now not the thing you do to enjoy to have a great time to get out some ideas that you've got, but in fact, it becomes a means to an end. And no one really enjoys the means to an end, you know, people who say I'm gonna go out and cut out a five, five mile run, because that's what I'm supposed to do. But rather, you're like, Well, I've got this great feature by the park, I'm gonna go down by the lake, what a different run that is. And I think the same is for writing, I just hated seeing the joy taken out of writing for so many students because it's something I get so much enjoyment out of. But it also is because there's a great deal of choice and freedom in it. And there's opportunity for me to discover what I like to do.
Stacy Hurst:And do I think a big part of that even saw this is early as first grade is sharing what you're writing. And and I think there's an added value. If we can safely do that in a classroom, and open the way to teach how to give feedback that is respectful and constructive, then we can all learn together. But I see with older students, they're really reticent to share anything, even when their thoughts are so great, right. And they usually are. The other thing, I guess this would account for any age is as you share that. And as you're reading your own writing out loud, you learn a lot about that, I still do that. Now, if I write a sentence that I'm not 100% about, I'll read it out loud. And then I say, oh, there's my problem, right? But when I'm writing it, I don't notice it. So I think creating that culture, of safely sharing what you're writing will help with that joy, but also bring awareness to ways that we can improve because we always can on our writing. You
Donell Pons:know, I love that you mentioned that Stacy and Lindsay has got a ton of things we could go on forever. I know Lindsey, you were thinking, Oh, well, we have enough for fuel. Oh, yeah, we got plenty. But just like Stacy's mentioned, those are other aspects of writing, too. They're equally important. It's the whole writer is editor. Right? That's another feature of the writer. That's that's all within what it means to be a writer. And being able to find a way to do that to help another and to also be able to help yourself by taking it knowing how to take those suggestions and recommendations to become a better writer. And I think everybody needs to remember something that I stuck in my head for a long time when somebody says how do I become a good writer? How do I become a journalist? I've been asked this question so many times by students. And I remember Ernest Hemingway, and whether this is exactly how he said it. I don't know over time, it could have been changed, but somebody would always pose Ask the question to somebody like an author like Hemingway and Hemingway's retort was always come right back very quickly and say, how do you become a good writer? You write. But that was great. You're right. So you need opportunities to just do the thing, right to do do the thing. And to do it many times in different ways. And express yourself, that's how you become a better writers by being able to do the thing. So
Lindsay Kemeny:it's striking a balance, because we want them to have choice. And we want them to have this, you know, beautiful experience with writing and to enjoy it. Plus, we need to the, you know, the explicit instruction, and writing and we need to be writing across all our content areas, right. So we should be writing several times throughout the day, and thinking about how we can integrate it and be purposeful when we have our students. Right. So good. Anything else? Because Daniela was going to go back to your your adults, because you have adults come to that need to learn how to read, do you work on writing to with some of them? And what does that look like? Yes,
Donell Pons:absolutely. We're working on writing the whole time, because as an adult, you're expected to do all of it right? As an adult, you're not expected to just be learning to read? And can you can you handle this piece of reading, but writing is every bit as important as reading for the adult. And so yes, those two are very much connected. So from the very earliest, when you're doing dictation, as you're talking about from the letter to the sentence, and we're doing all of the things within that. So parts of speech will be dropped into sentence. And then we may take sentence production. And maybe we did one sentence, and we were concentrating on the skill that was taught. But then it's how do we expand that idea to two sentences? And then it's taking a question that maybe has the same words that we were taught. And so we're taking that apart and decoding. But then now we're going to encode with our response. So what would an appropriate response be to that using some words that are similar to the words that we were decoding. So just all those ways in which you can help somebody have an opportunity. And then it's also restoring their desire to tell their own story, because that's really the foundation I was listening to an author even just this morning, who was apparently a showrunner and author for Fargo, if anybody watches that TV show, it's a really interesting author that I hadn't heard before. His name is Noah Hawley. And he has like six books or something. But he was talking about how really, as a writer, he broke it down to why do I love writing what's really the essence of writing? It's being able to tell something from your perspective over and over again, I thought that was really interesting is Who wouldn't want to do that? Right? We all have our own perspective, our own way of looking at things who wouldn't want to tell it from their perspective? And that's what he considered the joy of writing for him was being able to tell something from his perspective, which is interesting, and why wouldn't everybody want to have that opportunity?
Lindsay Kemeny:That's great. Awesome. And all of this also kind of reminds me of the tipping the boat that we've talked about. We get good too far, one way or the other, but we're trying to find a nice way to keep our boats levels. So anyway, great. It's exciting. I think teaching writing is one of the hardest things. And I just think like, every year, we can get a little better. Like, try something a little new, try something different. So this was great. Thanks for sharing all your ideas.
Stacy Hurst:Thank you guys. It's been a great conversation. And as we're talking, I'm thinking about our individual journeys, but mine as well. I've learned so much since I was teaching first grade. And I think, you know, we just can't underestimate teacher knowledge. So if this is an area that you feel like you are not very solid in, we've mentioned a lot of great resources today. And they'll be listed in the show notes. But we also have people we can reach out to experts, we have the magic of the internet. Now we could watch all kinds of YouTube videos on writing instruction. I know there's a lot out there, thankfully, about laying VanCleave from him. And you know, he is no longer with us, sadly. But that does help me think too. It's important to teach writing, because that's one way that we can be. I don't know, what's the word eternal. He's not here. But we still have a lot of his essence and spirit because of what he shared through writing and about writing. So I guess we'll end on that note, we're not going to in our instruction over kill on the mechanic side of it, but we're going to teach that for sure. And also include the ways that writing can be joyful and contribute to our lives. So thank you so much, Lindsay. Great topic. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of Literacy Talks. We hope you join us next time. Thank you.
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