Writing with passion has always been a goal I strive to teach whatever group I am instructing, whether it be 30 students in a classroom of 12 adults in a library setting. Teaching writing is always my most important focus of professional development.
My favorite personal professional developments of all time are the summers I spent participating in The National Writing Project. Here I learned to make teaching writing interactive and fun. Seeing students excited about writing in my classroom and actually rushing in before the bell to pick out the topic notebook they wanted to write in from the stack on the table let me know I was doing something right.
Want to create a writing community in your English classrooms from the very first day? These four lessons will certainly get you off to a great start. The First Day product is the actual lesson plan I used to greet students to my classroom. Class discussions generated from the videos we watched together and the first quickwrites in which they told me about themselves. The “Where I’m From” poem, which became the class group “Where We’re From” classroom wall declaration for the year, and let us all learn about each other through Author’s Chair readings.
The Quickwrites product can provide you with a year’s worth of prompts and after students get into the writing you can challenge them to write and submit their own prompt suggestions to fit your school and state or country. Quickwrites are fabulous for writing fluency when it may be tough for them to write a half page to a full page in the 15 minute timeframe. But doing it daily or a couple of times a week will improve the quality and quantity and help prepare them for the timed state test assessments looming on the horizon.
The abstract task cards include 40 first lines for writing short stories. They address higher level thinking skills for small group, individual, whole class, or writing center instruction. Since a student can write a maximum of 40 different stories (or more if they use the first line and change the plot of each story) they will stretch over a semester or a year.
44 Writing Notebook Topics are included which were created by my students and myself. You can add to the list with your own topics that fit your school and state or country. Students love to write in them and if they get their entry completed they may read in the notebook what others have written. Some teachers have exchanged notebooks with other classrooms or schools. I allowed different periods to write in the same notebooks, but I did not sent them out of my classroom. Rules for the notebooks are included in the plan.
This year I decided to bundle the four products together in a Back To School opportunity to allow teachers to start each of these important components at the start of the school year. But I certainly encourage teachers to implement any of the four at any time. It’s never too late to start a classroom Writing Community!
