What happens when the next unit in third grade writing workshop is poetry and the classroom teacher stumbles across an anthology of bilingual poetry? This post describes how a third-grade homeroom teacher and a Spanish teacher collaborated to implement an interdisciplinary, bilingual poetry unit.
Ryan Hur, Tam Mandanis, Kellen Pluntke, Rishi Singh, Christian Sporre, and Dawson Unger are six of the Bow Tie Boys who are a group of high school students from Northern Virginia. Today they take on the topic of student engagement in secondary writing classes.
Writing is joyful this year.
Are you worried about how much learning loss in writing will greet you after the summer break? Has your idea bank of ideas to gone dry?
This year, they were going to be the first group of 5th graders to break the summer curse.
My hope is that my students leave knowing more about themselves as writers and as people…that they have used the pages of their notebook to find answers to questions. Have you written in your notebook today?
As the year winds down, I am reflecting on our classroom blogging experience and what I’ve learned.
These young students come to me ready to write. They just need permission.
Our guest blogger takes a look at the 3rd grade Units Of Study
What challenges do your student bloggers face? How are you supporting their growth as blog writers?
So I stepped back and let the writers get to work. The chatter was about organizing notebooks, planning where they like to write and sharing writing over the summer.
After reading Write Beside Them, Tara Smith realized she had to connect her teacher and writer identities. No longer would it be enough to share mentor texts and confer. She realized she needed to share her writing life with her students and walk them through her thinking as she wrote.
Nicole Frederickson, a middle school teacher, doesn’t believe in diagnostic writing assessments at the beginning of the school year. Find out why she builds a community of writers before she assesses her students.
Kindergarten teacher Valerie Geshwind helps her students find their passions and their voice by honoring their interests, engaging them in a play-like writing workshop, & by supporting them as individuals.
Jenny Maehara believes poems are wonderful as a launching point for writing because students can write many poems in a unit and feel like prolific writers from the start. Find out how students can learn the habits of writers and the routines of writing workshop while crafting meaningful pieces using a balance of different details and thoughtful structure in Jenny’s guest blog post.
Learn how literacy coach Mindi Rench has helped middle school world language teachers to construct charts with their students, which has helped students’ writing in French and Spanish.
What would your students say if they were asked what writing workshop means to them? Find out what a group of first graders value about writing workshop in Betsy Hubbard’s guest blog post.
Dana Murphy shares some thoughts about the expectations we place on students when we ask them to reflect on their writing.
Christy Weisiger believes in calling students “writers”. Calling students writers gives students automatic entry into the classroom writing community. And that sometimes changes the way they will feel about writing for the rest of their lives.
Anna Gratz Cockerille provides tips for organizing and developing teaching toolkits you can use across the school year.
