Teaching Writing and the Reading-Writing Connection

It's SO nice to see you again! I have lots of things to share with you this week so I hope that you've got your pens and papers at hand! What I am about to share with you will absolutely blow your mind!

Prior to this class, I had been taught through a different course that Reading and Writing are connected and that a good reader is a good writer. However, this week's class really created that aha moment that I needed. 

So the lecturer comes in with many small reading books and I wondered what on earth are we gonna do with these? I was excited though because the weeks prior, language classes were so fun. We each got to choose a book and read it to ourselves. I looked for a book whose cover and title looked interesting and animated. I found a book that was entitled "Leo Goes To The Library" and there was a huge orange cat on the cover. Certainly, it could not have been that cat who was going to the library, I thought. 

The title and picture caught my curiosity so I chose that book.

The book was a short but interesting read and I could see children loving this story about the huge orange cat. After reading, the teacher asked us a strange question. She asked us to look at each sentence and see what lessons in grammar that could be taught from the book. 

Puzzled I began to go through each sentence and I realized that from this less than ten (10) paged book I could teach so many aspects of language. I could teach compound sentences (eg. When Leo wants to eat, he knows where to find food.), I could teach adjectives (eg. Leo is a huge orange cat, birds screech, pet shop), I could teach synonyms (eg. huge orange cat, big orange cat), I could teach literary devices (eg, purrfect), I could teach compound words (eg. inside, catnap, weekday) and many other things.

I was completely blown away by this discovery!

The one thing that I have taken away from this class that I will certainly do is to have reading books at EVERY CLASS! From this activity students can then write responses to these books in journals, summarize the books, improve on the different genres of writing. Reading helps students to learn different text structures and vocabulary and the use of language which would in turn help them to transfer this knowledge to their own writing. I strongly urge all teachers to include reading books into every language class and generate lessons from them. Furthermore, allow students to see the connections between reading and writing so that they themselves will see the importance of reading in order to become better at writing.