A Long Three Weeks

I essentially crawled into a hole for the last three weeks. My focus has been on getting everything set for school, getting to know my kids, and marathon training. Yep, I'm currently two week out from my fall marathon so that was sucking up time also! In the last three weeks we've had our first day, welcome back assembly, welcome back bbq, done pre-assessments, grouped kids for our rotations, met about special education students, and had curriculum night. This week seems like it is the first without anything really happening as far as events are concerned.

Where are we at? We're in a good place. Our groups are rolling, which means that kids are now knee deep in Social Studies/Literacy work. We've discussed non-fiction features, and been using them to find information. We've also started to did into geography, and kids have really been digging it. My homeroom has started a little beginning of the year project also: their biographies as word clouds. We start by typing up a short bio of ourselves (at least 10 sentences). Then we plug it into Wordle. From there, we need to look at the cloud to decide whether we want some words to be larger or not... if so, you need to write more about it! We've been doing it on our netbooks as well, so the sound of kids just typing away and whispering to their table group is pretty awesome. The talking you tend to get when kids are struggling to get going can be frustrating- this wasn't one of those times.

Could I write more today... sure. Instead I need to vow to blog more often. So I will! Perhaps a snip of my Wordle coming this week.

Writing Workshop

We've kicked off our writing workshop recently. In intermediate, the suggested unit to start with is "Launching the Writing Workshop." The work is to get students to learn different strategies to generate narrative writing. Additionally they begin to learn the routines that go along with the writing workshop- mini-lesson, writing time, conferencing as needed, and sharing at the end. Two weeks in, where are we?

As a whole, it is better than it was my first year. As I stated previously, I have a greater understanding of the trajectory in each unit being taught. I also think I am living the life of a writer more than I did last year. Some of my mini-lessons fell short last year because I was not actually writing enough alongside the kids. This year I am generating those stories along with them, or in advance so that students can see a demonstration. If I write prior to our writing time, we talk about the qualities we see in the writing that can be utilized in student writing.

But I need a greater commitment to some of our routines. In particular, I need to get back to ensuring our atmosphere fosters a commitment to writing. How so you say? Well I am inconsistent in my use of background music. When there is something playing, students are often calmer and write longer. I also am not being consistent when students are talking during our writing time. I find myself giving some students multiple reminders, a clear sign that they need some help. In recent days, instead of thinking about why students are off-task, I've focused on getting kids quiet and back to work. Bad practice! Ugh. Tomorrow we'll try to wrangle those few who are off-task, and potentially work in a small group. I might also leverage student role models to have them share work with those in need of support. We'll work on it tomorrow... not soon, but tomorrow!