For the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by Stacey and Ruth at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. Everyone loves comments, so feel free to link over and see what others are writing!
When I was in New York for the Teachers College Reunion a couple of weeks ago, Kate Roberts gave a presentation about writers' toolkits. (I wrote about it here.) Since then, I have been thinking about how to start my own for various grade levels and writing units.
I bought a sketch book and I tabbed it by grade levels and writing units:
Then, I had to start writing in ways that young writers might do. The goal of the book is to show students samples of not-so-great writing and strategies for making it better. After sorting through some piles of second-grade writing, I had some inspiration. I imitated some of their common mistakes on pages in the book. In order to create a sense of play, I made three options for how to "fix" my writing on some of the pages.
Students can lift the flaps in order to see a choice.
On another page, I asked the question, "What is missing in this writing piece?" Again, I used a flap to create some play within the lesson and wrote the writing sample over with what was missing.
My goal is to continue to develop pages, although the pages take a little longer than I had anticipated. This will be a work-in-progress, but I hope a valuable teaching tool for coaching teachers and for working with students. If anyone out there wants to contribute some common student mistakes, I would definitely appreciate them!
Be well,
What a lovely idea. Thanks for sharing. My students will love this!
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by this idea when you wrote about it before. I like seeing these pages and can see why it might take longer than you first expected. I think I will work on something like this over the summer. I need a little bit of time to think about what common mistakes my middle school students are making. I think I would maybe separate mine by mode or genre.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of having the options for revision. This would make them weigh the options. Hmmm, sounds like something I should share with teachers. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI have a page full of those common errors, this time mostly things like use of then & than, & share with the teachers of older students. It doesn't help just to keep editing their writing; it needs direct teaching. I love your idea of organization Melanie, and that you can offer different choices. It will help teachers save time. Thanks for pursuing this!
ReplyDeleteI like this idea, especially the flaps with choices and examples. I'm wondering how I can adapt it to use with my 8th graders. I wonder if they can help create pages with examples from their writing that can become a class resource or individual resource.
ReplyDeleteFabulous resource, Melanie...it will be well worth the effort it will take to get it all going. I have a handbook I created for mini lesson examples for just this reason, so that I have something handy to display on the Elmo when needed. It's still a work in progress...but it's getting there.
ReplyDeleteThis is great, Melanie. I love that you've given them choices about how to improve the writing. Models are so important!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing!
Catherine