classroom environment · environment · flexible seating · Reaching Your Writers Blog Series

Re-imagining Classroom Work Spaces: Reaching Your Writers

We cannot always afford to provide students everything we want to give them, but it’s important to find ways to give all kids what they need. It is possible to create a space with flexible seating options on a limited budget.

goals · independence · Reaching Your Writers Blog Series · strategies · strategy charts · writing workshop

Entry Points to Build Independence: Reaching Your Writers

Where are the places your writers find themselves stuck? Identifying our writers' sticky spots can help us determine entry points for writers to pull themselves out of being stuck and instead strive!

slice of life

Write. Share. Give.

It's a great day for a slice of life story!

blogging · Reaching Your Writers Blog Series · writing workshop

Helping Students Who Don’t Want To Write: Reaching Your Writers

How do we reach our writers who come to us from traumatic backgrounds? How do we help writers who have painful stories they don't feel comfortable sharing? How do we help children feel safe to write something when they prefer to sit and write nothing? Please share your ideas and experiences in the comments so we can learn from each other and reach more of our writers.

Reaching Your Writers Blog Series

Why Writing Matters: Reaching Your Writers

Kids need to know why writing matters. And we need to not only know, but presence that ‘why’, both for our students and for ourselves.

Reaching Your Writers Blog Series · writing workshop

Reaching Your Writers Blog Series

All week here at Two Writing Teachers we will be sharing how to reach ALL of your writers.

charts · opinion writing · progressions · standards · teacher writing · writing workshop

Sitting Side By Side With Standards

There is power in knowing and understanding standards because within them, we can extract teaching points, learning targets, and even success criteria. In this post, we'll thing about how we can use the standards so set up anchor charts, as well as learning progressions in order to establish clarity and navigable pathways for writers.

plan · purpose · story mountain

Finding Purpose Before We Write: Making the Most of Planning & Rehearsal

Writers need a purpose. A foundation.  Yet sometimes we rush kids through the planning and rehearsal phase of writing. What are some ways to support kids in heading into writing grounded in purpose? Read on to learn a few strategies...

high frequency words · word study

The Snap Word Train

Over the years, kindergarteners have shown me that the kinds of environmental tools that they will actually use are: ones which are at their level, ones which they have meaningful memories (or ownership) creating, ones which they can see themselves in (via photographs or interests), and ones which they can touch and interact with. Such… Continue reading The Snap Word Train

slice of life

SOL Tuesday!

Welcome to the first Tuesday in November!

conferences · conferring · plan · record keeping · writing workshop

Conferring Notes: The Key to Unit Planning

Crafting a system for conferring notes can be a catch-all of sorts, a strategy for ensuring that teammates engage in the highest leverage instructional conversations before the unit begins—even if they haven’t had extended time to unit plan together.

conventions · quick write · word study · writing workshop

Trying It Out! Using Ideas From Professional Resources

How do you keep learning and growing as a teacher of writing? How do you apply what you've learned from reading professional texts? Today I am sharing the way I am applying my learning from professional texts with my third grade students.