Language Abundance: Chain Linked Writing

Near the end of May, Dr. Janni van Hees came in and talked to the Manaiakalani COL teachers about Language Abundance within in our classrooms (see blog post here). One of the things that Janni spoke about was the idea of creating a dialogic chain (or paragraph) with our students to illustrate grouping details/ideas together in a physical chain.

This term, our school theme is "Move 'Ya Body" and as a focus the students in our learning space are exploring the Maori idea of hauora through their literacy tasks.  After introducing the concept of hauora to the students last week through their reading, we decided to have them write about how they have all four elements in their own lives.

This morning, I launched this concept with the students by providing time for them to Think-Pair-Share what they remembered about hauora.  We then discussed the elements of a paragraph (topic sentences, details, closing).  Students were randomly selected to read aloud sentence strips that were prepared ahead of time.

The class had to decide which statements linked together to form our introduction paragraph and which statements were random details that might fall into the body paragraph links later on in our writing. We also prepared a digital dictation of the paragraph for students to listen to and type into their assignment before writing their own body paragraphs. 

The girls enjoyed being our human paragraph chain. 

The chain was added to our wall as a visual reminder to apply to future learning. 

I look forward to later in the week, when we discuss student writing as a class to have students chain link the sentences they have written for their body paragraphs. Hopefully, this will provide a deeper understanding of paragraph development (and conversation skills) for the students in our class.