No More "I'm Done!"

Normally I do all of my reading over the summer but when my reading teacher showed me this book I just had to read it.  Because I am doing my National Boards this year I have been focusing a lot on writing in my classroom.  This book is great!! It goes through how you should set up your classroom to foster writing. It gives suggestions for tools that you can have available for students to use and best of all it gives you ideas for mini lessons that cover the entire year.

Here is what I have implemented so far from this book.

~I was always a writing journal type (it kept things more organized).  Now each student has their very own writing folder.  In my writing area I have different types of paper for students to choose from.

~Conference board.  When students are ready to show me their work they add their name to the conference board.  After we meet and talk they erase their name.

~After my mini lesson I give students 10 minutes of uninterrupted time to write.  It was hard in the beginning to not hoover and want to make suggestions, but I have found that they do their best writing during that time. After the 10 minutes I start to call students for conferences.  I also try to play classical music during those 10 minutes to keep their brains working.

I will keep you posted on what else I implement...

Fish Eyes A Book You Can Count On!

I love it when I can tie literature into my math lessons!! I left this lesson for my sub to teach on Monday while I was out and the kids loved it.

They read Fish Eyes A book you can count on! by Lois Ehlert

I also love guided drawing.  In this lesson they learned how to draw a fish.

Then they created a class book!

Lucy Calkins

Today I had the pleasure to see Lucy Calkins speak about her new writing units.  I can't tell you how amazing she is.  She is a wealth of knowledge.  I could not believe the stories she told from memory and the experiences she has to share. 

The big thing I walked away with was the Bill of Rights of Writing.  The basic concept is that you need to make writing a prior in your classroom.  If you don't make it a priority students will not excel in writing.  

Here is what Lucy considers Bill of Rights for Writing...

1. Writing is a subject and taught as a subject. Everyone teaches math. It would not be ok for a teacher to say, "I don't teach math in such and such a grade." Writing has to be
2.  During writing time the children actually write. During reading time the children actually read. They are not doing other things (workbooks, or other things).
3. They are writing in genres.
4. We are explicitly teaching them skills and strategies.
5. We teach editing explicitly so our children use their editing skills and punctuation skills.
6. Children will publish at least monthly.

It is not the same but here is a webinar that she gave on her Units of Study in Writing. 

Happy Writing :-)

Details, Details, and More Details!

My kiddos are doing a great job with thinking of stories and putting them on paper.  We have been working on adding details to our pictures these past couple of days. On Friday we read a House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle.  We talked about how the hermit crab didn't like his plain shell so he added "details" to make his shell more interesting.  

After reading the story I drew a large rectangle on the easel. Then I invited each child to come up an add a detail to the rectangle to make it into a house.  They did such a great job coming with different things to add.

When we were done we wrote about our house.  I forgot to take a picture of what we wrote but we wrote "The dog is chasing the cat. They are running around the house."