This chart was designed for yesterday’s session with intermediate level teachers who are just beginning to implement writer’s workshop. They are unpacking the Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing written by Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project this year, and the chart provided a tidy snapshot of the anatomy of a quality mini-lesson.
Michele Cammarata is a teacher fellow in the WNY Young Writer’s Studio. In an effort to learn more about the writers she serves, Michelle has turned her attention to the greatest experts at her disposal: her students. She’s watching them carefully, snapping photos of their work on her cell phone and tucking these photos into the pages of a sketchbook above, where she weaves her reflections around the margins of their drafts. This sketchbook is…
In my work with teachers, and in our fellowship programs at the WNY Young Writer’s Studio, I become closely acquainted with kids who absolutely hate writing. What’s worse is that they believe they aren’t capable of it. Why? Well, mostly because they are unable to sit silently before a screen or page and push words out of the end of their fingers in a coherent fashion until every inch of white space is covered in…
Many children and adults will tell you that writing is quite literally out of their grasp. They can’t wrap their hands around it, and since this is how they learn best, writing remains beyond their reach. Many writers need to move, and they need their writing to move as well. They need to write out of their seats and on their feet, spreading their ideas across whiteboards and tables, lifting pieces of them up with…
These are my first and favorite conversations with writers at the start of a new year. Before we crack into our new notebooks, before the first genre studies begin, we take some time to talk about what it means to be a writer and what it means to live a writer’s life. Teachers often ask me how I manage to write every day, and I always say that this depends on what people think it…
Anyone can write, but few people write exceptionally well. Myself included. I’ve been blogging for nearly eight years now, but I’ve always defined myself as a teacher who writes rather than a writer who teaches. I make no apologies for this, and in fact, if I had waited until I felt confident in my writing skills to share my stuff with others, I never would have grown as a writer. I wouldn’t have learned half…
This post is the fourth in a series about research and writing in Heather Bitka’s kindergarten classroom. To learn more about this project’s purpose and outcomes, you might want to read the first post. If you are interested in understanding how this project enabled the teachers and coaches involved to position themselves as learners, you can click through to the second post. This post demonstrates the beginning of instruction, where researchers applied strategies that helped…
In recent weeks, I’ve been spending nearly as much time writing with kids as I have been working with teachers, and let me tell you–this is good for the soul. Particularly when I’m given the space and time to really get to know who these kids are and the gifts they bring. I’ve been teaching in some capacity for 18 years now. I can’t see myself ever giving this up, and some how, I’ve managed…
What is good writing? What does it mean to “be” a writer?
Meredith Stewart recently began a conversation on the English Companion Ning about setting meaningful professional goals, and this thought of hers really struck me: “Based on the goals that I have seen from others, it seems the trend is to write very nebulous or very easily achievable goals. I would like at least one of my goals to be something at which it’d be possible to fail.” This is a compelling consideration, isn’t it? Goals…