OK Bob Patrick wrote this a year ago here. I just found it. It might provide an answer to the question about how to work with kids who need writing as per my previous post here this morning:
per the recent thread on writing and in particular relative to points made by Jim and jen in that thread, we know that kids don’t need to write too early (in the first few years). We know that much more input than we have available time to provide (thousands of hours, in fact) is necessary to make writing emerge from the unconscious data base in the real way.
As jen describes it: “Writing is simply allowing your story to flow onto a page” (vs. editing and revising). The first is unconscious and the second, the big No-No for we who embrace CI, is conscious. We know that little will result from having our students write too early and that it can even slow the very process it is supposed to help develop, as we have seen at least in Denver Public Schools.
But, as we learn so often in our work with CI, the ideal is often mitigated by the practical real world aspect of our situations – schools expect us to teach writing! (There is always that dichotomy between CI in the real world and CI as we are pressed to teach it in schools and we may as well accept it.)
So, since we pretty much are expected to teach writing in our CI classes, Robert Patrick has shared with us a real jewel strategy that can be used to develop the writing skill. It reflects what I consider absolute 100% best practice in a CI classroom for writing and is a model we could all use when we think about how we want to package the writing piece into our CI instruction:
ACIWritingPortfolioPlan