Significance
Writing is a challenging subject, whether a student is just beginning school or has been perfecting it for years. According to Mata (2011), students’ attitudes towards writing are already low, even in students just starting kindergarten. It is for this reason that writing needs to be addressed in a positive and engaging manner. If a student is constantly worried about writing, this will affect the quality of their writing and their success in future subject areas. Now with the coming of the Common Core Standards along with the intensified emphasis on writing, this skill is becoming increasingly important in every subject area. It is for this reason that teachers need to find an inspiring and meaningful way to implement their writing programs. There has been an abundance of research to date suggesting that the visual arts can inspire student’s writing. Olshansky (1995) found that the visual arts can create an anchor for student’s thoughts and was successful in improving students' writing and topic choices. It was for this reason that I decided to focus my action research on implementing pictures to engage learners in the writing process. I wanted to see how adding visuals would improve students’ topic choices and expand their writing. This goal seemed to be significant since the needs assessment data revealed that student attitudes about writing were already in decline.
Now, reflecting back on my action research inquiry, I have discovered tools and resources that have helped to expand, (1) student topic choices, (2) the vocabulary students use, and, (3) the descriptive nature of their work. Moreover, the student’s quality of work greatly improved over the course of this research. Results seem to demonstrate that even minor changes to writing can have an immense impact. Some themes that emerged throughout the inquiry are as follows:
Students’ writing will greatly improve when they are writing about a topic that interests them.
One of the most significant findings over both phase one and phase two was that students' writing will vastly improve based on their interest in their topic choice. Cole & McLeod (1999) conducted a study in which students wrote about line drawings or photographs. They concluded that photographs with interesting characters, an interesting scene and a conflict helped to improve the thematics of students writing. This finding is not consistent to what I observed in my classroom. Students in my classroom were more excited to write about a topic when the photograph presented was a cartoon picture of movies or characters that interested them. This may be due to the age of the students present in my class. Cole and McLeod’s study was conducted with middle school students. These students may be more capable of writing stories based on the conflict present in the photographs. My students struggled with photographs, but thrived when the pictures I presented were of movies and characters they loved. Since I began to provide pictures of cartoon characters, the students’ passion for writing increased immensely. This finding was demonstrated in the informal observations of my students over both phases of the research and also after our class field trip to the zoo. The zoo trip was so significant to the students that not a single student wrote about a topic other than the zoo. Even though, the students did not chose to write on a picture in a book as modeled during phase two, this helped to demonstrate how much of an impact a significant life event can have on the students' writing. This event prompted struggling writers to write more than six sentences, include more detail in their descriptions and helped to improve their choice of vocabulary and verbs.
Kindergarten students are not developmentally ready to create stories based on photographs or pictures in books.
A vast amount of research has focused on using wordless picture books to spark creativity and story telling in writing. According to Reese (1996), wordless picture books helped students “write stories in complete sentences, to expand their ideas to better describe pictures and to produce a meaningful story” (p. 173). Phase two of this project tried to focus on using pictures in books to spark storytelling and expansion of topics, but this technique did not seem to work for kindergarten age children. Even with repeated teacher modeling of making up character names and telling stories about the pictures, I rarely saw the students making applications to their own writing. The providing of pictures did appear to encourage students to add more detail to the their writing when they chose to write on the pictures. However, students still did not create stories based on the pictures. Instead, they described what was happening in the picture, but appeared not to be developmentally ready to explain why the character was in the conflict, how they were feeling or what they might be hearing around them. The students were instructionally capable and excited to create stories as a group, but they did not appear to be individually ready to apply this to their own writing.
Providing options and novelty in writing can greatly boost enthusiasm for the subject and help to expand writing.
One of the most significant findings from this research project was that students appear to do better and become more engaged when presented with some variety. This finding seems to hold true for all subject areas. My students were asked to come up with their own topics for writing every day for most of the year. They were beginning to resent the writing process and I constantly heard evidence of their frustration over trying to come up with new topic choices each day. The pictures that I provided and those in their books seemed to provide a new excitement for writing. The students were constantly asking about what pictures we would use today and if we were going to do writing. During phase one, the students were choosing to write during “daily five” when journal writing was not required. They seemed to have a renewed interest in the subject and I think this was because of the novelty that the pictures provided.
I believe this element of novelty to be an important lesson for all teachers. As a profession, we need to think about approaching subjects in a variety of different ways and through a variety of different modalities. Student interest and excitement over writing appeared to be renewed because of a simple change in the writing program. This finding was demonstrated in even in the initial days of implementation of my research. On those days, the majority of the class chose to try writing about a picture. By changing genres, using the visual arts, providing prompts and changing the daily routine of writing, younger children, for the most part, will most likely have a renewed sense of interest in the subject.
Kindergartners are extremely capable writers and their development in this area grows rapidly.
Over the course of phase one and phase two, all students made significant gains in their ability to write. These writing gains also coincided with their ability as readers. The more progress they made in reading, the more this showed in their writing. All of my students, regardless of their level at the beginning of this action research, made significant improvements in their sentence structure, penmanship, mechanics and overall topic choices.
This research also showed how capable the students are when gently pushed to write about different topics and to brainstorm different aspects of pictures. The students were verbally capable of putting themselves in the mindset of the characters and stating how they thought the character would feel in the picture. This skill is extremely advanced for five to six year old students and demonstrates that even younger students can be encouraged to come up with more detailed sentences and topics. By providing that novelty and by providing modeling, the students can make vast improvements in the subject of writing.
Now, reflecting back on my action research inquiry, I have discovered tools and resources that have helped to expand, (1) student topic choices, (2) the vocabulary students use, and, (3) the descriptive nature of their work. Moreover, the student’s quality of work greatly improved over the course of this research. Results seem to demonstrate that even minor changes to writing can have an immense impact. Some themes that emerged throughout the inquiry are as follows:
Students’ writing will greatly improve when they are writing about a topic that interests them.
One of the most significant findings over both phase one and phase two was that students' writing will vastly improve based on their interest in their topic choice. Cole & McLeod (1999) conducted a study in which students wrote about line drawings or photographs. They concluded that photographs with interesting characters, an interesting scene and a conflict helped to improve the thematics of students writing. This finding is not consistent to what I observed in my classroom. Students in my classroom were more excited to write about a topic when the photograph presented was a cartoon picture of movies or characters that interested them. This may be due to the age of the students present in my class. Cole and McLeod’s study was conducted with middle school students. These students may be more capable of writing stories based on the conflict present in the photographs. My students struggled with photographs, but thrived when the pictures I presented were of movies and characters they loved. Since I began to provide pictures of cartoon characters, the students’ passion for writing increased immensely. This finding was demonstrated in the informal observations of my students over both phases of the research and also after our class field trip to the zoo. The zoo trip was so significant to the students that not a single student wrote about a topic other than the zoo. Even though, the students did not chose to write on a picture in a book as modeled during phase two, this helped to demonstrate how much of an impact a significant life event can have on the students' writing. This event prompted struggling writers to write more than six sentences, include more detail in their descriptions and helped to improve their choice of vocabulary and verbs.
Kindergarten students are not developmentally ready to create stories based on photographs or pictures in books.
A vast amount of research has focused on using wordless picture books to spark creativity and story telling in writing. According to Reese (1996), wordless picture books helped students “write stories in complete sentences, to expand their ideas to better describe pictures and to produce a meaningful story” (p. 173). Phase two of this project tried to focus on using pictures in books to spark storytelling and expansion of topics, but this technique did not seem to work for kindergarten age children. Even with repeated teacher modeling of making up character names and telling stories about the pictures, I rarely saw the students making applications to their own writing. The providing of pictures did appear to encourage students to add more detail to the their writing when they chose to write on the pictures. However, students still did not create stories based on the pictures. Instead, they described what was happening in the picture, but appeared not to be developmentally ready to explain why the character was in the conflict, how they were feeling or what they might be hearing around them. The students were instructionally capable and excited to create stories as a group, but they did not appear to be individually ready to apply this to their own writing.
Providing options and novelty in writing can greatly boost enthusiasm for the subject and help to expand writing.
One of the most significant findings from this research project was that students appear to do better and become more engaged when presented with some variety. This finding seems to hold true for all subject areas. My students were asked to come up with their own topics for writing every day for most of the year. They were beginning to resent the writing process and I constantly heard evidence of their frustration over trying to come up with new topic choices each day. The pictures that I provided and those in their books seemed to provide a new excitement for writing. The students were constantly asking about what pictures we would use today and if we were going to do writing. During phase one, the students were choosing to write during “daily five” when journal writing was not required. They seemed to have a renewed interest in the subject and I think this was because of the novelty that the pictures provided.
I believe this element of novelty to be an important lesson for all teachers. As a profession, we need to think about approaching subjects in a variety of different ways and through a variety of different modalities. Student interest and excitement over writing appeared to be renewed because of a simple change in the writing program. This finding was demonstrated in even in the initial days of implementation of my research. On those days, the majority of the class chose to try writing about a picture. By changing genres, using the visual arts, providing prompts and changing the daily routine of writing, younger children, for the most part, will most likely have a renewed sense of interest in the subject.
Kindergartners are extremely capable writers and their development in this area grows rapidly.
Over the course of phase one and phase two, all students made significant gains in their ability to write. These writing gains also coincided with their ability as readers. The more progress they made in reading, the more this showed in their writing. All of my students, regardless of their level at the beginning of this action research, made significant improvements in their sentence structure, penmanship, mechanics and overall topic choices.
This research also showed how capable the students are when gently pushed to write about different topics and to brainstorm different aspects of pictures. The students were verbally capable of putting themselves in the mindset of the characters and stating how they thought the character would feel in the picture. This skill is extremely advanced for five to six year old students and demonstrates that even younger students can be encouraged to come up with more detailed sentences and topics. By providing that novelty and by providing modeling, the students can make vast improvements in the subject of writing.