For me, writing is one of the hardest subjects to teach. We don't really have a writing curriculum to follow (we don't have any curriculum, just standards), so we make it up on our own.
Luckily I have a great team and we work together well to share the responsibility of lesson planning.
Last year, I wasn't thrilled with my writing plans or instruction. I was okay with writing, but it was the subject I'd often skip on days we had assemblies, project based learning lessons, counseling lessons, etc. I think that dismissive attitude rubbed off on my students because they didn't seem to value writing either.
So instead of keeping with the status quo, I decided that this year I would be teaching writing first thing in the morning and do a more explicit job with modeling all steps of the writing process.
I also made sure that if we skipped a day in writing, we skipped math or reading the next time. More importantly, I verbalized this skip and why to the students. I think there is value in them hearing me state that all subjects are important and that's why we take turns skipping them when other things arise.
I also am explicitly teaching language mini-lessons instead of having them sprinkled throughout the writing instruction. Fifth graders could handle these sporadic truth bombs, but the third graders (at least my group) need a more systematic approach to language.
At seven weeks in, here's what we've covered:
They just finished their first papers (autobiographies) and we're transitioning into personal narratives. We'll do a few short writes, focus on conclusions, character traits, adjectives, and more typing mini-lessons.
We'll also be doing the Monster Project, but more on that later!
Upon flipping through old posts, I found that almost exactly a year ago, I blogged about a "said is dead" lesson in my classroom. I just delivered the lesson again in my classroom this year. However, revising for better words for "said" is a lesson nearly 100% of the fifth graders need.
This year, I made some tweaks. I paired this mini-lesson with another mini-lesson on dialogue and quotation marks. This was a logical pairing that just took me a few years to figure out.
While I suggested this lesson idea at grade level planning, another teacher actually made the plans for it. I was a little bummed when the plans turned out to be a piece of paper for them to glue into their notebooks.
So I made my own plan and my kids did really well with it!
We glued the resource into our notebooks, but after we'd make lists together. I gave each team a different emotion or tone (happy, sad, angry, loud) to have them generate lists. I then showed a few different images, like this one:
to have them create a dialogue between the characters (thus using the dialogue mini-lessons and quotation marks) and to replace said with more descriptive language.
They did a free write for few minutes, then shared the words they used instead of said, which I recorded on the board. They then shared their writing with a neighbor.
I like when they get so excited about what we're learning! Although due to their excitement and chatter, we were a minute or so late getting out the door...oops!
We are in the midst of Being a Writer's persuasive genre. While this doesn't perfectly align with our standards, I'm still enjoying their suggestions. For fifth grade, they're expected to write opinion pieces where they share their opinion and give factual reasons as support. The persuasive component isn't a standard until sixth grade.
We've clarified the difference with the kiddos and let them know if they want to try to persuade their readers, that's just dandy.
We've also been doing mini lessons with commas:
They're doing pretty well with these language standards! I'm hoping they'll apply their knowledge in their writing, since that's a great way to see if they truly understand the skill.
I modeled writing my opening:
It really helps my kids to see my example and color code the different parts (opinion and reasons).
Yes, I wrote about football. I think it's important to model real writing and for me, I would write about football. It's more authentic because they know I'm passionate about my sports and as writers, we write about things we know. I don't think they'd take the lesson as seriously if I wrote about why you should buy a pre-owned car instead of a new one. Yes, I could write about how it's cheaper, etc but I wouldn't be super interested in the topic. It wouldn't feel genuine to me and they'd pick up on it. It's important to bring a piece of yourself into the classroom and spread the joy of learning.
One of our fifth grade standards is working with the three types of verbs: action, helping and linking. Obviously this is too much for a single day of writing instruction, so we broke it up into 3 different days of instruction.
Yesterday, we worked on action verbs because that's what students are most familiar with:
Today, we worked on helping verbs:
One of my awesome coworkers found this helping verbs song to the tune of Jingle Bells:
My students are having so much fun with our mini-lessons on language :) After our lessons, they revise their own work and are sharing their published pieces. I really like that our Being a Writer unit has built in time for students to share their work with others.
I'll post more pictures after our anchor chart is done :)
