Glimmers

I love having days when I witness signs of my students becoming stronger writers. Here are four glimmers from my day:

• One of my students shared an original poem that she mentored after “How to Eat a Poem” during our Morning Meeting Poetry Friday Share. Her first line was mentored after the first line of the original poem that starts with “Don’t be polite…” (She had been practicing this in a strategy lesson I led on fluency.) When she was ready for questions or comments, the first one was, “How come you decided to write a poem like the published one?” The little girl immediately replied, “Let me read that to you…” (She had already written down an extra paragraph, below the original poem she wrote in her notebook that explained why she was inspired to write a poem like the one she read in the strategy lesson. I’m sitting there – floored – that she had the foresight to reflect on why she decided to mentor herself after another poet.)
  
• I edited a student’s work for run-on sentences during the Demonstration of my Minilesson. Hence, I put up another student’s personal narrative draft, which needed some punctuation and connectives to eradicate the run-ons in the piece, during the Active Engagement. I asked each of my students to work independently to edit the paragraph that was one big run-on sentence. Each child did so with his or her own take on it. The students who shared their edits aloud, when I debriefed before I moved on to the Link, deleted unnecessary words and added-in words that made the student’s piece flow better. Oh yeah, and they fixed up the run-on sentences, pausing wherever they inserted punctuation into the edited version of their peer’s paragraph.
  
• There was a LOT of noise during the independent practice part of Writing Workshop today. I don’t mind a hum in my classroom during the editing phase, but it just felt too noisy. I kept looking up, thinking I’d have to ring the chime since I assumed the kids were talking to people other than their peer editors. I thought wrong. It was noisy because they were doing what they were supposed to do: working diligently with their peer editors.
  
• Yesterday, I encouraged my students to watch the news and write about the election (e.g., their thoughts about the candidates, the issues, etc.) in their Idea Notebook. I checked three of my students’ notebooks today. Wouldn’t you know that one of them went home last night and wrote two entries in response to her thoughts on Election 2008. It’s so nice when kids go home and give a strategy you mentioned in passing a-go.