Writers Workshop

Teaching writers workshop is a beautiful and amazing thing because it allows our own creativity to flow out on to paper for our student’s to see. Watch me model a lesson. :) I used to be scared to death of teaching writing. I was caught in a world of prompts, forced topics and “journals”. At the time I didn’t realize that this wasn’t building authors, I just knew that there was pencil put to paper, so I thought I was fine. In the past year I was introduced to “crafts”. I was in love with writing. Writer’s Workshop now is a joyous and electrifying time in my teaching day. So, where do you begin? Well, you need to learn the basic outline for Writer’s Workshop. Let’s go through step by step with one of my favorite books The Very Lazy Ladybug. With The Very Lazy Ladybug , a great first lesson is on “word wrapping”. As you can see from the title of the book, the words “wrap” around the pictures. Now that you’re ready to begin, you have your book and craft picked out, it’s time to start.

I Keep a Writer's Notebook alongside my Students. Do you? I began requiring journal writing way back in 1990--my first year of teaching. I had taken a methods class at my university that stressed the importance of having students keep journals to record daily responses to topics. I said, "Why not?" and every student from day one maintained a spiral-bound "journal" for me. In the spring of 1998, thanks to my high school journalism students' hard work, I was awarded with a month-long, summer fellowship from C-SPAN in Washington, D.C., and the first thing the wonderful folks at C-SPAN asked me to do upon arrival was to keep a daily journal that documented my experience there. When I returned to my classroom in August of 1998, I showed and shared entries from my summer journal every day during that first month of school. Over the next dozen years that followed that trip to D.C., I slowly improved my ability to inspire my students with the daily writing expectations. I have to be doing something right.

Writing Objectives Using Bloom's Taxonomy | Center for Teaching & Learning Various researchers have summarized how to use Bloom’s Taxonomy. Following are four interpretations that you can use as guides in helping to write objectives using Bloom’s Taxonomy. From: KC Metro [old link, no longer functioning?] Bloom’s Taxonomy divides the way people learn into three domains. One of these is the cognitive domain, which emphasizes intellectual outcomes. This domain is further divided into categories or levels. From: UMUC From: Stewards Task Oriented Question Construction Wheel Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy Task Oriented Question Construction Wheel Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. ©2001 St. From: GA Tech According to Benjamin Bloom, and his colleagues, there are six levels of cognition: Ideally, each of these levels should be covered in each course and, thus, at least one objective should be written for each level. Below are examples of objectives written for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy and activities and assessment tools based on those objectives.

Writer's Workshop Resources and Ideas The majority of time of Writing Workshop is devoted to independent writing. During this time, students are prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing their pieces. Depending on the age and abilities of your students, independent writing can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as 45-60 minutes. It helps to build stamina with your class, beginning with a short amount of time and building that time until they can work for up 30 minutes or more. According to Katie Wood Ray (The Writing Workshop, 2001), students can also do other activities during their writing time, such as writing in their schema notebooks journal writing writing exercises to experiment with language and style conducting peer-conferences reading to support writing During independent writing time, the teacher confers with students about their writing. Teachers should keep conferences short. Websites on Conferring: