This may help us think about our first post for Week One.
- What are we teaching now and why is what we are teaching important? Make a post sharing one thing you are doing with writing this week and why. I believe we should be more introspective concerning our practices. This will allow us to think more about our own assumptions and beliefs.
This week we will be sharing what you are currently focusing on in writing in your class. I want you to also consider WHY you are doing this.
ReplyDeleteThe book cover is from one of my favorites. We are not using it as a reference but it is a good read. We use it as a text in the Virtual Open Institute.
ReplyDeleteOne writing concept that we are working on this week in 4th grade deals with organization. This trait is important because organization helps students write sequencial, giving flow to their overall story or assigned writing. We will be reading a story and talking about transitional words that lead to organization while noting what strategies help writers organize their papers. Also, students will be looking at the lead or opening sentence and how that is organized to keep a reader reading...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kate! You serve as a great model. This is exactly what I was looking for for a post.
DeleteIronically, I am talking about transitional words in my basic college English class 108. We are talking about appropriate use and trying to look at ways to expand transitions. We are exploring the power of the transitions in persuasive writing. Students will be specially trying different transitions in their antithesis or concession sections.
I use the 6 traits and show them that transitions work to improve fluency, organization, and word choice.
From Debbi:
ReplyDeleteI moved this to the correct place from Debbi:
I am really looking forward to sharing with my colleagues the writing activities that we are doing. This week a writing task evolved from building a survival shelter in the woods. Third graders are learning about Outdoor Survival Training with one of the parents and myself. As they worked, they came up with a story idea: "The Lost Class." One of the students went home and wrote and illustrated a story that very night! The kids have been very motivated to write these stories. I used a storyboard graphic organizer as a prewrite (I called it a plan with them.)
I teach P.E. half time, along with a section of Health, Introduction to Health Care Careers (Health 105), and Anatomy & Physiology. In my sit down classes this past week, the focus of the writing assignments has been ideas. As a science teacher, it is very easy to only focus on ideas, although my rubrics for projects always involve more.
ReplyDeleteI have a local PE teacher who has students work on exercise journals once or twice a week. I was impressed. Do your students also have to work on filling out forms? It seems there is much of that in the health profession now.
DeleteMy PE students do write in the form of work-out logs, heart rate records, and reflections on activities. For my general P.E. class, they do not write daily, but they do write at least once a quarter. However, my weight lifting class does keep daily work-out logs. In addition to that, all of my P.E. classes begin the semester by writing their fitness goals.
DeleteMy writing class has been focusing on stronger sentences. We are doing this at this point in the class because we've been building on first improving the amount of writing, then learning better descriptive language and more clarity of nouns and verbs. I thought that building their confidence would help when we move into better sentence writing and eventually critiquing their own writing.
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