Reading and Writing: Make the Connection!

Allie's Basketball Dream - "possible story" By Kendyl One day Allie went to the park. She found a basketball on the ground. She asked everybody in the park, but it wasn't anybody's. Then she remembered that she aimed to be a professional basketball player. Then, she would be a team captain. Once, she pretended that she was a hall monitor, but she liked basketball better. She wanted to play basketball, but she didn't know how. She felt sad because she didn't know how to play. Then, she learned how to play from an older boy. Allie decided to play basketball until she is a professional. She heard someone call "Allie. " "That voice sounds familiar," she thought. She was right, it was her dad. They went home and lived happily ever after. (Kendyl, third grade student) The above story is a "possible story" based on Barbara E. Barbers' story "Allie's Basketball Dream" from my district's basal textbook series, Trophies: Changing Patterns (Harcourt, 2003). Kendyl , a third grade student, wrote this "possible story. " The use of "possible stories" is just one of many activities that I utilize when integrating the teaching of reading and writing in my third grade classroom, "possible stories" will be explained more in depth later in this article, along with a variety of other strategies that I use to integrate the teaching of reading and writing. Reading and Writing Standards and Outcomes I used to look at reading and writing as two separate subject areas. I would plan for and teach reading and writing separately. Decoding skills and comprehension strategies were taught during guided reading using my district's basal text and other children's literature. Writing skills, such as grammar and sentence structure, were taught using activities unrelated to the literature that we were reading. The writing process was taught using prompts, story starters, and informational reports that were unconnected to the readings. Finally, spelling was taught using lists of selected words that may or may not have been related to the reading. I was teaching all of the necessary concepts and skills for reading during my "reading time" and writing concepts and skills during my "writing time. " I felt confident that I was teaching all of the state required proficiency outcomes, and later the Ohio Department of Education's new English/Language Arts K-12 Academic Content Standards (2001). Although I was sure that my students were learning the necessary reading and writing skills and concepts, I still felt like something was missing. When I took a closer look at both the reading and writing state standards, I found many connections and similar outcomes between the two (see Figure 1). Due to these similarities and connections, it made sense to me that reading and writing standards could be integrated and taught simultaneously or used in correlation with each other. Fundamentally, students need to be able to show clarity in their written work and reading comprehension. They need to acquire and apply new vocabulary, understand an author's word choice, and make appropriate word choices in their own writing. They need to use and understand a variety of organizational structures. Students learn to establish purposes for both reading and writing. The new standards also require students to clearly provide written responses to literature. It is easy to make a correlation between reading and writing, because they have similar processes and outcomes. What Research Says About the Reading and Writing Relationship Research shows that reading and writing have a reciprocal relationship (Abbott, Reed, Abbott, & Berninger, 1997; Shanahan, 1988; Spiegel, 1998). According to Stotsky (1983 cited in Spiegel, 1998), "better writers tend to be better readers,. better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and that better writers tend to produce more syntactically mature writing than poorer readers (p. 118). " Lewin (1992) agrees that reading and writing both follow a common process for constructing meaning (Squires, 1983; Tierney & Pearson, 1983, cited in Lewin, 1992). …