We had a successful and productive first week back from our Thanksgiving break. We had one of our best lessons in writing. A revising lesson that we have done for years, took on a life of its own and turned into a lesson on the writing process. The lesson comes from the book, 6+1 Traits of Writing by Ruth Culham. In the planned lesson, students are instructed to make something out of clay. That is the only direction they get. As they are creating, we are recording comments and questions they have. After ten minutes, time is up. Then, they have two minutes to add something to their creations. After those two minutes, they have two more minutes to take something away. Finally, they are told to change something about their creations. When this is done, students title their creations, and then give each other feedback. This was the best part!
Usually, we just focus on the connection between adding, taking away, and changing their creations to revising in the writing process. But, this year, through our dialogue about their conversations, we ended up making connections to the whole writing process, especially the importance giving specific feedback during peer conferencing. It was such a success, and for life of us, we can't figure out how we couldn't see this connection before!
The following day, we had students revise a piece of writing that they had been working on during writer's workshop.
We again talked about theme in guided reading. Once we finished Unlovable by Dan Yaccarino, we tied in the target skill of story structure to help us find the theme of the story. The students then had to write what the theme was and provide evidence from the story to support their ideas. This activity is another extension that we are planning on adding to our Unlovable lesson plan on our teachers pay teachers store over winter break.
Good luck with your holiday shopping these next few weeks! We know this can be a crazy, hectic time of year!
Kim and Anne
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