I have LOTS to catch up on from the past couple of weeks but thought I would start with my post about writing. Definitely the toughest subject to teach, in my opinion, but it's also one of my favorites!
The first week of school we introduced our Work on Writing station and tied it into our Writers' Workshop model. If you are familiar with the sisters' Daily 5, you are familiar with i-charts. If you are not familiar, here is what I know...when introducing one of the components of Daily 5 you always create an i-chart with the students that highlights their responsibilities during that time. It also shows the kids that the teacher will be also be working... with students. :)
Here is our class i-chart on what the students and I do during Work on Writing.
The kids just loved the word, STAMINA, especially when we discussed "bathroom stamina". I did have to front load the definition of stamina as most kids were not familiar with it. But by the end of our lesson, they understood that they would "keep on keeping on" with their writing as long as they could. We even did an 9 minute "Build Stamina time" where we all wrote without interruptions for nine.whole.minutes! The best part was when I announced that time was up, I heard more groans than "yays" because they wanted to keep on writing. We congratulated each other and promised to write even longer tomorrow. :)
So, that led us to an impromptu activity the next day on What Good Writers Do. Honestly, it was impromptu because we were supposed to have our library time rescheduled to that morning but 20 minutes before the bell, the librarian let me know that we would keep our scheduled time on Friday (the next day) after all. So, I had to plan something for writing and fast!
I knew this was a focus of what I wanted to teach today in our mini lesson and it worked out great. I called the kids to the floor and we came up with ideas on what good writers do. We started off with a great discussion on what we have seen in GOOD writing. A lot of kids reflected back to our journal rubric that I had introduced a few days before (yea! they were listening!). After creating a list on the board, I later typed up their ideas.
Why did I type them? Well... 2 reasons actually!
1) I am not a fan of my handwriting and do not write neatly in front of the class. Seriously, it's bad.
2) I wanted to have them typed so I could cut them out and hand to students later, as a review, and have them make the poster. :)
And that's what we did. I glued on the title and the cute kiddos at the bottom, but the kids did the rest!
You can get the printables for this and create your own with your class too. It's a FREEBIE and it will always be so enjoy!
Go snag it {HERE}!
Be sure to rate and give some feedback if you download it!
I will be sharing a few more things from our past couple weeks so bear with me. There has been lots of fun stuff but not a lot of time these days to blog about it. Anyone else feel this way?!?
Until next time!
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