Writing? Writing. Writing! The punctuation reflects my thoughts about this rotation of Daily 5. I really love writing, and I love to teach writing to my students. This is a really important part of Daily 5 because it allows students the freedom of choosing what they would like to write about all the while practicing a specific skill that you have taught them. I don't think that we as teachers give students enough time to practice skills before we want to assess them, which usually leaves us pretty frustrated because the students just "aren't getting it" fast enough. No wonder! We aren't letting them practice without fear of messing up, and we are expecting that a one time mini lesson will be enough to master an entire skill.
Wrong!
My first two years of doing Daily 5, I used Writing as a stand alone rotation, meaning that everyone had to do it daily, and it wasn't combined with any other rotation. This year, I combined Word Work and Writing and let the students choose between these two, and I have to say that I wasn't all that pleased with how that turned out. I noticed that very few students were choosing to write, and as a result, I don't believe the writing was that great as compared to the first two years. In the first two years when the students rotated through Writing daily, they were filling notebooks with pages of creative writing, and they were excited to put pencil to paper. This year felt like more of a struggle, so you can guess what I am planning to do this year-- yes...go back to keeping Writing as its own rotation.
I have a variety of tools that I set out to help unlock the writer's block that students sometimes get when you tell them to "go write" for 20-30 minutes. I have story cubes, little story starters, and journal calendars that I print and give to the students from Busy Teachers Cafe. I have been giving them each a calendar to keep in their notebooks for idea inspiration, but I think this year I will just print one copy and place it in a binder with the other writing tools.
To be honest, the other tools I mentioned were barely used. Students seemed to have enough idea inspiration on their own with the help of the in-class activities we had done on the Ideas trait. I plan to not use the story starters and cubes this year. What I do want to use is this idea, which uses classroom journals on specific topics (sports, seasons, animals, etc), and the students can contribute and write their own entries in the topic-specific journals. This will give the students the great opportunity to read what other students are writing, too, which I think is really important for ideas and inspiration.
I am also going to have a binder full of travel brochures, magazine/calendar pictures, and greeting cards that can offer inspiration for struggling writers.
Lastly, I plan to have a bin where students can place their journals at the end of the day if they would like me to take a look and read what they wrote. They can mark the page they'd like me to read with a sticky note and then I can read that entry and provide them with a little feedback. This is not to be confused with grading the journals. The students need to feel comfortable writing without criticism.
What to take from this post...
1. Give students the opportunity to write freely each day.
2. Older kids tend to not need the gimmicks and writing "toys" that younger kids need.
3. Give students the opportunity to have their writing read by you without criticism.
Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, which will be for Read to Someone!
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