Writing Conference blurb

I was talking with my Disliker during our conference. Our focus lesson had been on collecting words. He didn't have any yet. (The students were expected to look for words to collect during no walk, no talk, and then they could choose what to do after that.) I asked him about his other entries...trying to look for another teaching point. He said, "I have to find words. I might as well get it over with."

Oh....I felt so bad that he thought it was a chore. He made an amazing map of his face and after a teaching point on naming your entries, he was off and working on something else.

Tomorrow we are creating wish lists...excited to see what the writers wish for.

Infamous

It's official...my boot is famous! So famous that one of my students wrote about it in her prompt.

Background - She was in Puppy Island (she fell into a book)

"Miss Cathy was so tired she forgot to put on her boot. I brought it with me. It was cool!"

Nice...

It worked!

I recently talked with a fellow blogger and teacher. She had shared with me how in Georgia Heard's book, A Place for Wonder, the students researched their topics and questions by looking at the books and then WALKING AWAY to write down their thinking. This caused the students to have to paraphrase and NOT copy...oh my goodness! I did this today and you should have seen how these students worked! We could have researched for an hour and I don't think it would have been enough for them. Now, granted some students ended up researching more than one topic and one boy only wrote one fact. BUT...when you have students thanking you and telling you that this was the best thing ever...I think Georgie was on to something in her book.

And...I shared it with one of my colleagues and she's going to try it with her class. I'm excited to see how it goes!

Can you tell I'm excited for tomorrow? We're going to dive into the index and find answers to certain questions and then Friday, begin writing down big topics to teach and sort our facts. LOVE IT!

Maybe I could

I have been toying with the idea of starting a writing club at school. I know that most teachers teach a workshop method, but to open it up to students who REALLY like to write. Encourage them to submit their writing on the internet and to other publishing companies in the hopes that writers learn that they have an audience when they write.

Any thoughts from those of you who teach?

BTW, found a great place where students can submit book reviews. I may have my class do this when we start writing book summaries...okay, maybe my student teacher will have taken over by then..so who knows, but it's something in the back of my mind.

He's a genius...

I had a student teach on Friday for writing workshop! It was great! He showed that he reread his writing so he knew what he was writing the day before and where he was in the place of the story. Then he told the students to try it themselves. IT WAS GREAT! Then I taped them actually doing what he suggested. In sharing circle, students then shared about how rereading helped them with their writing that day. One student even thanked him. With editing and permission from parents, I might post it here. Might is the key word.

I'm a genius!

Okay, not really...it was by the grace of God. I had originally planned on teaching a focus lesson on strong action words, but I thought some dialogue needed help after seeing a student's writing yesterday. I shared from an author that we are using to mentor our writing and broke it down into three steps. And then it came to me...add some action to it. My students remember things so much more if we add action or hand motions to them.

Three things that dialogue needs
1) Character names
2) Tag lines (said) - this is where we added action by having students tag (some ended up whacking) themselves as we said the tag line
3) Quotation marks - and yes, we use our fingers to make air quotation marks here.

Did it work??? We'll see when they turn in some writing for me to read...I'm excited!