Launching Writer's Workshop

My writing coach is aces! I wish I could keep her in my room all the time; she is so observant, so positive, so tuned in to what kids are doing (and not) in their writing. I learn so much watching her mellow, instant conferences as she moves effortlessly through the room. And when we meet after school, and talk about what we saw, she always has great ideas for where to go next. Really, I need to stop going on about her, or somebody will come take her away. I feel the same way about my principal, haha. Like, nothing to see here! Move along! But really, they are both fantastic and I live in fear that they will be whisked away for greater things. We already share Lisa the Writing Coach with another (huge) school, so I'm on eggshells with this one.

Anyway, we launch Writer's Workshop on the very first day of school, and by the 15th day we are doing our first publication. It's our way of introducing the whole writing process, beginning to end, before we go into our first full unit (Narrative, for us).

I also have this little area above my writing center, which needs to be populated with the different things students write ("things" is, obviously, a very technical term) but meaning letters, lists, stories, postcards, notes, etc.

 

The 15 days of launching lessons are pretty flexible. They're structured enough if you're just beginning to implement W/W in your classroom, it will support you in the day-to-day decision making that keeps the class moving. But there's definitely room for adjusting and making it your own if you've been implementing for years. I am going to say, no matter how long I've been doing this, I will always appreciate the road maps. I just don't have the band width to kill it for 7 subjects every day. I'll take all the help I can get!

And well...that's how I came to be doing a lesson on "lists" during the first day of school to launch W/W with my second graders. The launching lesson was to be for teaching the process of Think-Pair-Share, but, honestly, our kids have been doing a knee-to-knee T/P/S protocol with A/B partners and structured language support since Kindergarten. We can all do it with our eyes wide shut, so instead, I decided to link the writing to a shared experience.

First thing in the morning, to launch Daily 5/CAFE strategy (check for understanding), I had read the students the book "Friends" by Helme Heine. It's such a sweet story!

Later, when they came back from lunch recess, I read them the story of Mean Jean, The Recess Queen by Alexis O'Neil

 

We had just had recess, then we read about recess, so it was time to talk about recess. They moved knee-to-knee to tell their partners what they liked to do at recess. They had plenty to talk about!

 (Writing Coach Lisa...down on the floor listening to kids! <3 her!)

After they had a chance to tell their ideas orally, I introduced the format of a list. They told me about where they had seen lists before (when they go grocery shopping, at Christmas time, etc.) We referred back to the "Friends" story (this was now the third time we'd used this story on that day, so they were very familiar with the characters and the plot). I opened the book to different pictures, and asked them to remember what the friends did on their adventure. As they remembered, I recorded them on our chart, and pointed out how I was making a list (the title, "Things the Friends Did Together", the numbered items, etc.). Then I gave them a piece of paper from a list notepad (long and skinny, with lines on it) and they went back to their desks to write a list of "Things To Do At Recess".

 What terrific little writers they were! They got right to work, and of the 30 students, 29 of them followed the list format I had modeled. Awesome! Lisa and I conferred with writers, mostly about stretching out words and writing what we hear...they were very hung up on "how do I spell..."  There's a place for that, but it gets in the way of getting our ideas down, so we will continue to develop our sound it/write it strategies. For our mid-workshop interruption, where you highlight some positive thing you see somebody doing, to help direct (or re-direct, as the case may be) any students who are having a hard time getting started or are confused about some aspect of the writing, we highlighted two students who had made a title and used numbers in their lists (most kids had done both without prompting, based on the modeled lesson) and two students who stretched their words and wrote what they heard.

The second day they wrote about a special object. We read Knuffle Bunny in the morning and Ira Sleeps Over in the afternoon.

 

I cannot be the only person who has used one or both of these texts to introduce writing about a special object, but I will go on record to say they work, alone and together, perfectly to inspire a full page of writing from Littles, which I for one, will be using as a baseline for their second grade writing.