I found the article Teaching Science Writing to First Graders: Genre Learning and Recontextualization, by Julie E. Wollman-Bonilla, most relevant particularly to the curriculum we are currently working on in class. "When they write for functions of everyday life and work, even young children may discover what writing can accomplish in the world (Hall, 1998). But writing's potential power relies successfully anticipating audience perspectives and needs." As we are focusing on purposeful writing, and audience consideration in our class work for 10th graders, I strongly believe that introducing this type of writing early on in a student's education would be beneficial for strengthening and developing their writing as they progress through the grades. Introducing this by having students keep Family Message Journal Dialogues not only has students writing to a familiar audience, but also begins to introduce the concept of reflecting back on their own work at an early stage. "Sharing their writing with families capitalizes on children's desire to communicate with others by providing feedback on message clarity and effect within a purposeful task." Additionally, having families respond to a student's work in an open dialogue forum, can serve as incentive for a student to take more pride and engagement in their work.

As I have found in my own experience with student teaching, modeling activities and writing for students proved to be quite effective when assessing whether this method trickled down into student's work. "However, the teacher in this study did not explicitly discuss grammatical choices such as the use of present tense verbs to suggest timelessness in science writing. Rather, they modeled the use of such verbs and systematically discussed text structures such as “I think…I proved…” or “Today we did an experiment.”

When I re-entered a middle school classroom this past fall, I was quite shocked to discover how different it was from my own education. Most notable was the absence of the endless amount of grammar lessons we would receive. However, once I became more familiar with modeling my own writing and grammar for students, it became clearer how learning through content was just as beneficial. Yet, the one setback I found a bit surprising was the lack of spelling skills or instruction these gifted and talented 6^th graders were given which exemplified in their writing. Has anyone else noticed this as well? I have heard that in some elementary schools students are not explicitly being taught spelling on a regular basis, and other middle school teachers have expressed their qualms about this as well.