Using Science Read Alouds and Inquiry Activities to Enhance Student Writing in Family Message Journals

The results of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress indicated that most students are not proficient writers and that science performance declined in the 1970’s, increased during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and has been mostly stable since. Perhaps a way to correct some of these problems would be through the use of Family Message Journals in science. The purpose of this study was to examine the content and structure of first grade Family Message Journals when children responded to informational books and to science inquiry activities. The study took place over a one-week period and the students wrote home to their parent’s daily. The researcher wanted to determine if the children were more interested in writing about information from books, or about the inquiry activity and if children made connections to their lives between the activities and books within their messages to their parents. The data for this study included daily field notes, sixteen students' journals messages and their families' replies. The children’s journal messages were the key pieces of data and the focus of the textual analysis as the researcher looked for object and event responses as well as connections to real life within the messages to the parents. Parent responses were coded and analyzed for types of responses, number of responses and word count. Results show that young children who are emergent and beginning writers can learn the basic components of science genres in a context where they are guided to compose such texts through teacher-led joint construction of models followed by independent practice. Family message journals provided an interesting venue for exploring the deliberate re-contextualization of genre conventions to fit the context, purpose, and audience.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Alabama Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Turner, Tina

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/15980

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ir.ua.edu:123456789/15980