From the desk of Carol C…
You have the opportunity to go to Hawaii, and everything for you is free. Would you take it? What about Paris, London, Rome, or southern Germany free of charge? Pearl Harbor, the Louvre, Tower of London, or Bavaria. Of course you would. It would be the opportunity of a lifetime. You would explore part of the world, learn about a different culture, and grab some time at the beach. …
From the desk of Carol C…
Recently I’ve noticed in many classrooms where writing seems to have taken a back seat to reading and math. The reason, I think, is that school systems and the state have emphasized these two subjects more than any others. However, the performance tasks in the Common Core exemplars are centered around writing. The tasks focus on content, but they require extensive writing in order to completely cover the topic …
From the desk of Carol C…
Writing across the curriculum…it’s a phrase we hear often these days. Any grade level can look through the exemplars and see the level of rigor expected in writing assignments in all areas, not just Language Arts. The first step in helping students attain these expected levels is to make sure we understand what we need to be asking our students to do.
What does “writing across the curriculum” mean?…
From the desk of Katie M…
When people think of poetry they always think rhyme but that’s not always true. There are many different types of poems like free verse, cinquain, haiku, lyrical, concrete and so on. None of those besides lyric actually has to rhyme. This is important to tell your writers!
I noticed this rhyming issue in the past few years as I learned more about writing poetry. I don’t think my …
From the desk of Carol C….
Publishing was hard for me for a long time, and I never had it down to a science. I think it had something to do with the way writing was taught when I first started teaching. Assign the topic, students write, students turn in their papers, teachers correct the papers, teachers hand the papers back, students copy the paper over with corrections, teacher corrects papers again in pencil this …
From the desk of Carol C…
The Common Core doesn’t directly list writing poetry as one of its standards. So why teach it if it’s not in there? “How do I tell thee? Let me count the ways.”
First of all teaching students how to write poetry requires that they understand what poetry is and how to interpret it. Both of these ideas are in the CC standards for reading. Poetry teaches the writer …
From the Desk of Tina…
The little girl reread her sentence and erased the words again. “That … doesn’t … sound right,” she mumbled. She flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder in frustration. Her eyes moved from her paper to the board, back to the paper. She placed the paper on her desk and sauntered to the board. She looked intently at the picture about which she was writing. When she first began …
From the desk of Carol C…
Tackling the writing conference is one of the most rewarding and unrewarding parts of the writing workshop. It’s rewarding because you can see the fruits of your labor. You can see the progress that the writer has made. You can pat yourself on the back and say “job well done”. On the other hand (and there’s always another hand) conferencing can take you to the valley of shadows. You …
From the desk of Carol C…
When you implement Writer’s Workshop, you are going to include many mini-lessons across the year. Mini-lessons are just what the name implies…short lessons that focus on a writing strategy, an author’s craft, or a convention . To see how “mini” they are, look at the following schedule for a typical writing workshop.
Writer’s Workshop Schedule
1 min. Connection to previous learning
5 min. Teach Mini Lesson
5 min. …
From the desk of Kris…
A picture is worth a thousand words…..well, okay, for a kindergartener maybe it’s not a thousand words…but it certainly can be worth many words. If you ask any kindergartener about his picture, he is sure to tell you a lengthy story! But does drawing a picture and telling a story constitute ‘writing’? You bet! In her book The Art of Teaching Writing, Lucy Calkins states that 90% of children come …