Quote of the Week:

“I tell them [her writing students] they’ll want to be really good right off, and they may not be, but they might be good someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing. And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they’d want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together.”
(Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott xxix)

Lessons:

This week teachers finished up their celebrations for the second unit Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing.

Reflection:

We are heading into a 10-day holiday. School will resume Dec. 6th. At that time I will be meeting with teams to walk them through the 3rd unit in the series: Breathing Life Into Essays, which we will launch after the Winter Holiday in January. Our year-long plan for teaching writer’s workshop left us with 2 weeks in December which need to be filled with a “mini-unit” of some sort. Teams have been asked to create these units and to independently put them into Atlas.

An option our teachers have been given comes from the series The Complete Four by Pam Allyn. One of the units offered in these grade specific books, is a 10-day unit with a focus on conventions. I am advocating using these lessons because they are targeted to each grade level, provide an extra burst of practice with very targeted skills, and follow the same structure and routine of a minilesson we’ve worked so hard to establish in our writer’s workshops. I will share what our teams decided to do in upcoming posts.

Next post- December 11th.