SLICE 2014 - 3 of 31 A Writing Hum

Everyone is writing.  Everyone is focused.  There is a writing hum in the air of room 104 today.  How did we get there?  What's different about today than in the past two months?  The weather hasn't changed!  It's still freezing outside, new snow is on the ground, indoor recess was just before lunch, and it's March 3. We can keep hoping for an early spring outside but I think I witnessed a bit of spring inside today during writing workshop.  Again I ask, what's different about today than in the past two months?  

We had a consistent attendance pattern last week, finally.  I stepped away from a new teaching resource.  I used data from a recent on demand writing assessment and saw all of my students need to work on mechanics and conventions in their own writing.  I took a lesson idea from this new teaching resource and instead of doing it in just one day, I've spread it out over three days.

I started our time together today looking at student writing from last week and having the students share what they notice these writers did well.  We then made an anchor chart What Makes Writing Easy to Read to make our thinking visible and easy to refer to.  We organized our writing folders.  We had just sent home old pieces and had a few new pieces from last week.  We decided which pieces were done and would go on the red dot side.   We then decided which still needed to be worked on and placed them on the green dot side.

I haven't been able to get to the copier to copy and produce little booklets, so we are using single sheets for writing. Maybe the shorter pieces are letting us focus more on the all the tasks a writer needs to think about. Maybe it's not guiding their writing topics and feeling a sense of choice was important to them.  We just got tongue depressors to use as spacer sticks and we think they are pretty fun to use.  It's magical how these have helped spaces appear in everyone's writing.  Before going to write independently, we talked about what writing workshop sounds like and could look like.  I mentioned we would share and look at more pieces of student work at the end of our writing time.

Off they went, gathered their illustration tools and paper if needed.  Five and six year olds love to talk as they work but today, they all worked truly independently on their own.  I think all of these things were little seeds that different student's collected, sprouting a writing hum we all enjoyed.  A hum that sprouted and fostered writers.