creating young writers

Almost two weeks down... can't believe how fast time flies! I have definitely been WAY over-prepped and haven't gotten to half the stuff I made copies of or half of the fun ideas I had planned... but I guess that's not a bad problem. I'm still trying to get the hang of our schedule and when to stop/start different subjects. We switched our recess time from 2:30 to 2:15 so that I could come back in the room and not be all flustered about trying to get our new planners that the entire school is implementing into the kids backpacks with notes from the office and all that in their Take-Home Folders. Stressed out teacher is what that equaled. Today was better with going to recess earlier. Me likes.

We're off to a good start in our writing process. Last week they did a free write before I taught them anything (so I could evaluate where we are in the process) and I was a little uneasy about it after day one. We read Arthur Writes a Story and then worked on starting the writing process by thinking about what we know. *great book for this concept b/c Arthur starts off with his own idea and then changes his story based on other peoples because he thinks it will make it better. In the end, it turns out that his story was not really believable and his class/teacher liked his original idea better.

After reading Arthur and discussing our own ideas/trusting ourselves, I modeled how this works for the kids. I brainstormed ideas that I know about, we talked about creating an image in our mind and then drawing it on our paper. After a day or so of that, we switched our focus onto really labeling our illustrations and writing a short one/two sentences about our picture--then going back to adding more pictures/labels/sentences when we think "we're done--we've just begun". (this was pretty neat because I got to share my story about hiking in Yosemite this summer and then got to show the kids video of the waterfalls/river there when they asked if I went swimming in it--all of them were so amazed since they had never seen one before! Way cool to share that experience with my kiddies).

We did circle maps about ourselves and today we discussed different topics we can write about and why we write. Made this for a visual for the kids to reference whenever they are at the, "I don't know what to write about stage."

 

Happy Friday to all you amazing teachers out there! :)