SHHHHHHHHH....BEWARE Live Monsters!!!

A few weeks ago I walked into one of my classrooms and was greeted by children telling me to watch out there were live monsters in the room. This teacher gave each child a monster. The monster was their writing buddy. Sometimes these monsters brought messages, made messes and kept us all on our toes. One day 3 were even sent to the monster hospital. The kids were so motivated to write! It was precious to hear their whisper conversations with their monsters. The writing was precious and brought great quality. These kids have now taken their monsters home but are still very motivated in writing. What a great idea and joy to see!

Fired Up About Writing

Whew!!! This post has been written in my mind for about 3 weeks, but time is flying so fast and life is crazy busy!

The week prior to the 4th Grade STAAR Writing test we hosted Camp Write Along in the afternoons. The 4th Grade STAAR Writing test is a huge to kids. We wanted to pump kids up in self -confidence while helping them tie up a few loose ends. We transformed their area to look like a camp.

We had the three cabins to rotate through each day along; there was the Composition Cabin, Revising and Editing Cabin, and Revision Cabin. Plus, each student had the opportunity to visit the Writing Conference Cabin for an individualized conference about their writing. Each cabin was filled with activities to fit each groups special needs. The kids LOVED it! The novelty eased the anxiety and gave them confidence. Even though we were tackling hard skills such as combining sentences and transition words in my cabin, the kids were so pumped up!

We ended the week with a celebration. We read the book Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor. This book is wonderful and would also be great at the beginning of the year when establishing a classroom community. Then, we painted good luck rocks. This turned out to be a powerful activity. There were so serious when painting their special rock, Plus when they had their rocks on testing day, it was obvious the comfort the rock provided. We ended the celebration with a snack of S'more Cupcakes.

Absolutely Amazing!!!

Yesterday, I had the privilege to drop by a friend's classroom. I left in complete amazement and with excitement. She teaches 4th Grade Writing. We all know that is a hard job with our new standards. They were all working in workshop very diligently with independence. They are just learning about writing expository papers. There were 8 kids working in pairs about the same topic with a specific purpose such as similes, sensory language, experience, etc.... The partners brought their index cards back and were to assemble them into a paragraph. Talk about powerful and meaningful hands on revising and editing!!! It was amazing to watch and listen !! This activity was tough but made kids think. They had to talk to each other to find a way to merge these four cards into a sensible and cohesive paragraph. Watching them it was obvious that they gained more from this type of mini lesson than go work on your first expository paper. "

It makes me be reflective....

*Do I make writing hands on enough?

*How can I make my mini lessons more powerful?

*Do I have enough academic talk going on in writing?

*Am I using strategies in writing that require higher order thinking and are out of the box?

A huge thank you to my friend for inspiring me and for inspiring your crew of writer's!! I loved every single minute .