Bringing a Whole Language Approach to Middle and High School Classrooms
This post has been sitting here with no text in it for weeks. How appalling! When I came back to this title, I realized that it’s kind of silly — after all, the alternative to whole language is generally phonics, and middle and high school students should have a good handle on how to read and write by now. However, to me, a whole language approach means more than just being immersed in good literature — though literature immersion is always a wonderful place to start. To me, a whole language approach means interacting with language, not just passively imbibing it as though you were watching television. I think we all know that reading a novel can be just as escapist — and just as relaxing — as sitting in front of a television sitcom. There is a place for reading, and it has enormous value, but middle and high school kids often learn more by doing things for themselves, rather than by receiving knowledge from on high (or from the pages of a book).
So, to me what this means is that middle and high school kids can benefit from spending some time producing their own media. This could mean writing and editing their own newspapers and magazines. But it could also be something simpler, like scrapbooking. Teachers can encourage students to produce a scrapbook that is like a yearbook — but it is the student’s own personal yearbook, or personal remembrance of a particular event (the 6th grade field trip to a dairy farm, a family vacation, or a local team’s sports season, for example). Student scrapbooks could be physical, but they could also be digital. A webpage can be a virtual scrapbook.
In the spirit of my last two posts about iPods and podcasting, I have to also note that students can also write podcasts, video podcasts (vlogs), blogs for webpages (like the writing I am doing now), scripts for commercials, marketing materials, etc. Ideally, teachers could find ways to integrate other aspects of the curriculum into language practice. For example, a student working on a science project could blog and/or podcast about the progress. Students could, for example, take a trip to a pond to collect specimens for examination under a microscope. They could document the field trip by taking digital pictures, posting them on a website, and writing about the day. Then they could prepare samples, view them with a microscope, take digital pictures of the samples using a microscope camera, and post the pictures, along with detailed lab notes.
Or, here is another idea for using webpages to engage students and encourage them to write: have students write a round robin short story on the class website. Each student can write one installment in the story and post it to the website. When all the students have finished their pieces of the story, they can share it with their families via the website. For remedial learners, this kind of approach relieves students of the pressure of having to write an entire story from start to finish, and gives them a fun and engaging way to practice a short piece of writing.
This is a great idea!!!!!!!!! It would be much more fun than what we usually do in class. I wish we had a newspaper this year, last year it was really fun even though it was sort of hard. We wrote a bunch of round-robin stories the other day in the lab in reading. We were supposed to be nonviolent folktales, but they didn’t turn out that way (there were some very crazy topics, including an alligator who ate eggplants and a sad, hornless unicorn). For some reason, Billy was mentioned in every story (usually as an evil person).