It is day 20 of the Classroom Slice of Life Story Challenge for Students. Your students have been blogging for nearly three weeks!
Category: writing workshop
Four Quick Steps: Are You Ready For Opinion Writing?
To help guide our teaching we needed to know what our kids can do and where they would need our support.
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Shaking Up Personal Narrative
Ever since I read this post by Katie Kraushaar, I've been thinking about personal narrative and wondering why it is that students, particularly in middle elementary grades and beyond, are sometimes less than enthusiastic about this genre. Like Katie, I have felt the mood change in a classroom the moment the teacher mentions the words "personal narrative."… Continue reading Shaking Up Personal Narrative
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Transitional Phrases for Information Writing
Information writing is a great opportunity for teaching students about fluency and transitional phrases.
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A Peek Into My Evolving Chartbook
Over the years, my chartbook has evolved. Here are some of the latest pages.
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Resetting Student Ownership and Student Responsibility
We realized our students needed to revisit why they are reading and writing in reflection to their current needs as readers and writers. Our work has shifted from the skills of learning to decode, spell, and use conventions to inferring, synthesizing, identifying and applying craft techniques, using voice, and then sharing our synthesized thoughts and stories with others.
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Pausing to Reflect: Personal Essays
My third graders are wrapping up their unit on personal essay. While some have grasped the structure and have articulated reasons and examples to support their argument, others have struggled to understand the concept of an essay. I want to take some time to think about what went right when teaching this unit and where the breakdowns occurred.
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Three Ways to Teach Empathy Inside Writing Workshop
This video, narrated by Brene Brown, has been viewed over 7,000,000 times. Empathy is more complicated than its twin sister, sympathy. Empathy is a challenge for a lot of people--not just kids. The great poet Nikki Giovanni has said, "Let me clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems.… Continue reading Three Ways to Teach Empathy Inside Writing Workshop
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Setting Goals With Students
Once we teach students about goals and the importance of them in our lives, we can use the accompanying language in all aspects of their, and our own, learning.
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The Power of Silence in Conferring
I took a deep breath and paused a long pregnant pause. My next words needed to be just right.
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Watch. Look. Listen: AUTHENTIC PURPOSES FOR WRITING
Writing is a stalwart act. Through writing, we express ourselves, uncover feelings, tell our stories, organize our schedules, share our beliefs, and change our world. To some students (and even adults) writing can seem like a monumental task and writing may feel cumbersome. But when you think of the necessity of writing in our lives, writing is unavoidable.
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Writing for Audience: Authentic Purposes for Writing
Sometimes we write to clarify our thinking or record a moment so it won’t be lost in our memories. Other times we write to entertain, inform, or instruct. Recently, many of us have found writing to be an avenue for us to express opinions, voice our beliefs and persuade others to join us in our… Continue reading Writing for Audience: Authentic Purposes for Writing
