Daily 5: Variety and independence during Work on Writing

Hello and Welcome to my fourth Daily 5 blog post! I hope that you have enjoyed my previous posts about general Daily 5 set up, Read to Self, and Word Work. If you missed them, simply click the links below to catch up!

How to Get Started with Daily 5
Setting Students up for Read to Self Success
The key to an Interactive Word Work Round

Now, I want to put this out there right away and I said this in my other posts as well, I am in NO way affiliated with "the sisters" or the Daily 5 on any official platform. I think that the sisters are FANTASTIC and I highly recommend buying the most current Daily 5 book. But me? I am simply a first grade teacher who utilizes the Daily 5 framework and I have adapted it to meet my own needs.

This post about Work on Writing is the most challenging for me to write. It is definitely the area in which I struggle the most in my own teaching and in my Daily 5 routines.

My literacy instruction time is broken up throughout our school day. Last year, my students had 20 minutes of Work on Writing time everyday after lunch.

Ideally, I'd love to have time for Work on Writing independent journal writing every day, but I'm sure that you all understand the struggle to it in everything that you want students to learn. To accommodate handwriting instruction, I structure our work on writing time a little bit differently for each day of the week. Here is what our schedule looks like:

Monday: Independent Journal Writing (free writing)
Tuesday: Handwriting Practice using Handwriting without Tears curriculum
Wednesday: Independent Journal Writing (free writing)
Thursday: Handwriting Practice using Handwriting without Tears curriculum
Friday: Portfolio Writing (responding to a writing prompt)

We have a separate block of time in the afternoon for Writers Workshop. During writers workshop, we focus on more "project-based" writing including narratives, informational writing, opinion writing, how-to books, poetry, etc. For my students, work on writing tends to focus more on conventions, ideas, and organization.

Monday/Wednesday Work on Writing Independent Journal Writing:

I will begin by explaining how I set up Work on Writing at the beginning of the school year. Over the last couple of years, my first grade team has experimented with different types of paper/notebook options for work on writing. We decided that it was helpful to have students write in a notebook for easy organization purposes. We also soon discovered that our little first graders struggle to organize their writing/illustrations in a standard wide-ruled notebook. At the beginning of the year especially, students are not able to fit their handwriting in the small lines. They also struggle with how much of the page to use for their pictures, where to begin writing, etc. When we spoke with the second grade teachers at our school, they had found a wonderful solution to that problem. The second grade team had ordered a composition notebook for each student with handwriting lines on the bottom half of the page and a space for an illustration at the top. We have ordered these composition notebooks as part of our budget for the last two years and I LOVE them! Here is a link to the notebooks on Office Depot's website. Since we order through our school district, we can use the Business Office Depot prices and the notebooks are only $0.96 each on the business site. I highly recommend looking into them!

Just like with Read to Self, I begin with an I-Chart of our Work on Writing expectations. The Sisters recommend making the anchor chart with your class, but I have found it to be cumbersome and time-consuming. I typically have the chart prepared ahead of time and I briefly go through the expectations with my class.

Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of my Work on Writing I-Chart at this time. It is currently in my classroom, which is being cleaned at the moment. I will include a picture of it as soon as I can, but here is a list of my student expectations that I include.

- Get started right away
- Pick what you write about
- Stay in one spot
- Write the whole time
- Underline tricky words

The biggest part of beginning Work on Writing is modeling the writing process and building writing stamina. I model the writing process out loud for them on the carpet. I begin by putting the date at the top of the page and modeling how I sound out words as I write. One of the key factors in guiding students to be independent writers is encouraging inventive spelling. I tell students to "underline tricky words" in their writing that they would like to revisit later and keep writing. At the beginning of the year, I focus on spacing, punctuation, and correct letter formation in my mini lessons so I model this thought process out loud as well.

Then, I set them loose. Students are always sooooo excited to write in their notebooks for the first time.

On our first day of Work on Writing, we write for 2 minutes (using a digital timer on the projector) and then we regroup on the carpet to do a "check in." I go through all of the expectations on the I-Chart and students give a thumbs up, thumbs to the side, or a thumbs down for each expectation based on how they think they did. Then we go and do two more minutes of writing.

To track our writing stamina, we fill in our stamina meter after each successful work on writing session. Grab my stamina meter freebie by clicking this link!

During work on writing, I check in with students about their writing. We discuss their writing and I provide instruction on conventions, organization, and ideas. One of the things that I struggled with during my first few years of Daily 5 was feeling like I wasn't getting to students as often as I wanted to give them individualized instruction. Last year, I started had a realization that changed my work on writing time significantly. I realized that many of the skills that I was teaching during work on writing were very basic. I started using 3rd grade writing mentors in my classroom. Beginning in January, I invited a few of my former students back into my classroom during our work on writing time. I chose students who were strong writers and leaders. These third graders chose to give up their lunch recess twice a week to come in and help my young writers.

I gave each third grader a Writing Mentor Folder with a writing checklist and a few other resources (sight word list, blends and digraphs chart, etc - There are MANY resources available out there - I think I found these for free using Pinterest). When the third graders came in, they grabbed their folder, a pencil, and a timer. They called over the next student on their list and had the student do some writing with them. After about 5 minutes of supporting that student with their writing (focusing mainly on basic conventions and generating ideas/details), they took a closer look at the writing with the student. Together, they set a writing goal that the student would continue to work on. Then the third grade mentor wrote the goal on the paper next to that student's name.

The writing mentor process was wonderful!!! I absolutely loved it and so did my students. These third graders were a wonderful resource for me and my little firsties. Of course, choosing mentors who are strong leaders is the key! I highly recommend a process like this for writing support in your classroom!

Another way that I spiced up our Work on Writing time was opening up our writing center. Every two weeks, students got a turn to visit the writing center, where they got to write letters, postcards, short stories, lists, etc. Here's a previous post that I wrote when I put together my writing center. Occasionally, I also included some of Cara Carroll's Work on Writing activities at my writing center. I LOVE them!

Tuesday/Thursday: Handwriting Without Tears

My school district recently adopted the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. Unfortunately, I really only have time to complete it twice a week, but I LOVE the way that handwriting is taught using this curriculum. Please click this link to learn more about Handwriting Without Tears.

Friday: Portfolio Writing

My favorite part of Work on Writing is our Friday Writing Portfolio time. Each week, my students respond to a writing prompt. My students keep these portfolio writing samples in a binder, which is very exciting for a first grader! They take this writing very seriously and it is a wonderful assessment tool for me.

Here is a link to a previous post that I wrote about our writing portfolios. It will tell you everything that you need to know about setting them up in your classroom!

Throughout the year, we celebrate students progress through a "portfolio showcase." Students show the class their first writing sample, followed by their most current sample. Students comment on improvements that they see in the writing.

For a direct link to my Writing Center: Yearlong Writing Portfolio, click here.

Well, that's all I have for you about Work on Writing! I hope that you found this post to be helpful. Work on Writing is definitely still a work in progress for me. Please feel free to comment with any helpful tips that you have for fostering independent writing in your classroom!

Stay tuned for my next Daily 5 post... up next is Listen to Reading!

A Year in Review: Writing Portfolios

As I sit here on my first day of summer vacation, I am reflecting on my most recent school year. I just finished my third year of teaching first grade. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone! As I reflect, my most exciting addition to my classroom this year was the use of writing portfolios. It greatly impacted the way that my students viewed their writing this year. We had many discussions and celebrations of students' progress!! As I continue to use these portfolios in years to come, I'd like to continue to work on improving the way that I have my students self-evaluate their own writing.

Here's a look at our writing portfolios!

I decided to start these portfolios at the last minute in August. I ran to the Dollar Tree and picked up twenty 1 inch binders... next year, I am putting these on our school supply list!

I labeled the spines and we kept the portfolios on a shelf in the classroom. Many students wanted to keep them in their desks, but I knew that they would be destroyed in the chaos of a first grader's desk.

UPDATE & FREEBIE HERE: One problem that I had with labeling the spines was that the labels peeled off throughout the year. This year, I am going to get the binders with the clear pockets on the sides so that I can slide a label into the spine. Grab my updated cover for the 2015-2016 school year and my spine labels here.

Our writing portfolios include 37 writing samples, one for each week of the school year. When I created this product, I mapped out each week and included a variety of different types of prompts. Here's a peek at the way I mapped out the 2014-2015 school year. (My product includes the same document, but I removed the weekly dates since I know that everyone's school year is a little different).

We completed an entry in our writing portfolios every Friday morning and students really loved the routine. We began on the first Friday of the school year. I made it a very serious deal and we even put up our "office dividers" to have a more private work space. This helped students to stay focused and think seriously about their writing.

Right from the beginning, I introduced my students to this checklist on the back side of their portfolio writing paper. Students went back and checked for various pieces in their writing. In the future, I'd like to differentiate this checklist a little bit throughout the school year.

I kept the writing pages very simple so that there are no distractions from the students' writing and illustrating. Here's an example of Week #1.

One thing that I love about using these writing portfolios is that they are such an EASY, SIMPLE assessment tool for me! Having weekly samples of student writing is a blessing and parents LOVED to look through them at parent teacher conferences.

Here are examples from two different first grade students. One writer is more advanced and the other is an intervention student.

My intervention firstie:

My advanced firstie:

It was so fun watching each of these darlings grow in their writing this year... along with the rest of my class!!

If you are interested in using writing portfolios in your classroom, please check out my Writing Center: Yearlong Writing Portfolio. It could be used in most lower elementary classrooms, including kindergarten, first, second, and third grade!

Writing Portfolios

If you have been reading my blog over the last couple of weeks, you know that I am totally spicing up my Daily 5 Work on Writing this coming school year. My students will be rotating to five Work on Writing centers throughout the week... working at one center each day. These centers are for more informal practice of writing skills that we are working on and my purpose is for them to be FUN and ENGAGING! We have a separate Writers' Workshop time in the afternoon where we will work on more formal writing projects and we will spend time planning, editing, revising, etc. Now, that is not to say that I will not stress BEST work during the Work on Writing centers as well, but my goals in creating these centers are for my students to LOVE writing and to be creative!

1) The Creation Station (click the link to see my previous post)

2) Story Central Station

3) Handwriting Practice

4) Sentence Building and Puzzles

and for the purpose of this post...

5) Writing Portfolio Work 

Okay, that being said, the Writing Portfolio Center will probably be the "least fun" of all of the centers, but I am soooo excited about the assessment opportunities that it will provide for me.

Last week, I made a trip to the Dollar Tree (in my opinion... the "TOP DOG" of dollar stores...) and I bought a binder for each student in my class.

I plan to keep the binders and reuse them each school year, so I figure that buying them myself was an investment in my classroom (and binders are not on our school supply list). When the portfolios are finished at the end of the year, I will take out the pages and bind them into a book for the kiddos to take home!

This morning, I printed a slapped a little label on the edge of the binder for each student. I have a perfect little spot on a book shelf for the kids to store their portfolios. As a side note, I FINALLY figured out how to PRINT ON LABELS... in the past, I've been using Sharpies to write names on labels because I've been too lazy to find and download a printable template... well, ladies and gentlemen, it is EASY! I don't know why I've been avoiding it the last few years!

If you want to pick up these labels, they are Avery 1" x 2 5/8" white address labels, 30 labels per sheet. Here's the link to the free template on the Avery website.

Okay, enough about the set-up... I created a writing prompt for each week of the school year.

Each prompt is labeled with the # of the week and there is a place for the kids to write the date at the top. There is a place for a picture if the kids would like to draw a picture to accompany their writing. Some of the prompts encourage the kids to draw a picture and others do not.

The back of each writing prompt page has more lines for the students to continue their writing... and my favorite self-check tool, a quick checklist for the kids to check their writing before adding it to their writing portfolio binder.

Here's our fun cover page that my kiddos will color and personalize during the first week of school!

This is going to be my source for assessing students' writing weekly. Even if the kids miss a week at the center here and there, I will have TONS of writing samples to see their progress over time!

Okay, so my Writing Center: Yearlong Writing Portfolio is up in my TPT store. I designed this writing portfolio with first graders in mind, but it would be appropriate for most lower elementary classrooms!

Can't wait to get this up and rollin' this year! Enjoy!

Writing Center: The Creation Station

Okay, here we go people... I cannot wait to get back into my classroom (it is being cleaned right now) to set up one of my writing center areas for this coming year!

 

THE CREATION STATION

Everything in this post is 20% off in my TPT store until midnight on August 1st!
Plus, there are many FREEBIEs embedded in the post itself!
Enjoy!
 

My goal in putting together this center is to have a place where kids can go to CREATE! Kids will have the opportunity to go to the Creation Station once a week as part of our Daily 5: Work on Writing and they can make cards, postcards, letters, and lists. As the school year goes on, I hope to find other fun seasonal writing activities to feature at the center.

 

 

Here's what I created to hang above the wooden desk where I will have the center.

 

Grab these decorations/labels for free here!

 

At the center, I plan to have fun writing supplies and various writing tools throughout the year.

 

star tins from {Target}

I also picked up a great set of seasonal word helpers... We will feature "Words of the Month" at the creation station for kids to use in their writing.

 

 

Grab your own set of A Year of Words from Renee Dooly's TPT Store. There are lots of other things that I plan to do with her word cards... these long ones (featured in the pink basket) are perfect for our creation station.

 

Okay, so our three YEARLONG activities at the Creation Station will be

 

{LETTER WRITING}

 

{POSTCARD WRITING}

 

{LIST MAKING}

 

I created sets of materials on TPT for each of these forms of writing with different writing paper, lists, etc that correspond to each month of the school year.

 

Here is a FREEBIE that combines the September portions of each of the three types of writing. If you like what you see, please consider buying the YEARLONG sets of each!

  

Here is what the

LIST MAKING

will look like:

my example

In my experience, first graders LOVE making lists. When we do Work on Writing and they are working on "journal writing," kids are always writing lists of the things that they like to do, the people in their family, their friends at school... and I am always telling them to "add more detail" or "tell me more about those things." Now, I will always encourage them to add more details into their journaling and descriptive writing, but I figure... WHY NOT give them the opportunity to make lists in a productive, organized way!!

 

Each month, there will be new rings of list topics at the creation station. For every month, I created 17 little task cards (+1 monthly cover page... hence the odd number of 17 task cards). Some of the list topics will be themed for the given month and others will be more generic.

 

 

I picked up these cute baskets from the Dollar Tree to hold the task cards.

 

There is also a variety of list writing paper with a new border for each month. In this file organizer, I have two of the list making sheets on the top shelf and on the lower shelves, I put our two featured letter writing sheets for September (more later about that)!

Click the picture below if you are interested in my complete set of list writing centers.

Here is what the

POSTCARDS 

will look like:

my example

This is a totally new idea for me, POSTCARDS.

 I think it is a great, quick way to get kids writing and it's not overwhelming for your emergent writers!

Back to School themed postcard

 Each month, we will have new postcards in the writing center that are themed to the month.

Again, I couldn't pass up these awesome baskets....

Click the picture below if you are interested in my complete set of postcard centers.

Here is what the

LETTER WRITING

will look like:

my example

During our free choice time on Fridays, my kiddos are always writing notes and letters to their friends and family members. Each month, we will have new letter writing paper in the center.

I also hope to get more letter writing resources for the creation station. Leave a comment if you have any great letter writing resources for my kiddos to use!

Click the picture below if you are interested in my complete set of letter writing centers.

I hope that you enjoy this post about our CREATION STATION! I cannot wait to see it in action this fall!

Writing Center: Here We Come!

Okay so I NEED to get my work on writing time REVAMPED for the upcoming school year. For the past two years, my Daily 5 Work on Writing time has consisted of journal writing, journal writing, and more journal writing. (We do have a writers' workshop in the afternoon during which time we do more formal writing projects). All I have to say is that in my experience, journal writing becomes boring and a chore to kids after about the first month of school.

 

This year, I AM DETERMINED to get my kiddos excited about Work on Writing time! And what I need is WRITING CENTERS! I am going to have 5 different writing "centers" that students will rotate to throughout the week. ALL of these centers are a work in progress right now.

1. THE WRITING CENTER EXTRAORDINAIRE: list making, letter writing, card making, postcards, etc. My goal here is to have tons of fun writing materials and options for kids to "play" with writing and have free time to create!

2. Writing Portfolio Work: Each week, I am going to have a writing prompt that students complete. We will stress "best" writing at this center and all of their writing will go into their special writing binder so that we can look back at the kiddos' writing throughout the year. Perfect of assessing as well! :)

3. Writing Puzzles: A variety of different sentence building activities that we will complete throughout the school year.

4. Story Writing Center: A center with story starters, mini books, and materials that kids need to write their own stories.

5. Handwriting practice- My first grade team makes handwriting books for kids to practice letter formation. I will also have various handwriting activities that are a little more interactive.

 

Today, I made a trip to the Dollar Tree and Michaels Craft Store to get some initial WRITING CENTER EXTRAORDINAIRE materials:

 

{letter writing stationary}

 {Minnie Mouse and Ninja Turtle markers}

{sparkly pencils}

 {apple erasers}

 

The first materials that I just completed is my

 

WRITING CENTER: LIST MAKING EDITION

 

**FLASH FREEBIE UNTIL MIDNIGHT ON JULY 30**

Click the picture to access my TPT store.

 

 

In this writing center pack, I created list-making task cards for each month of the school year and a set of list making paper for each month.

 

Total of 160 cards and 9 different list making paper options.

 

 

I already printed and laminated 5 sets of my September list making cards and I have them ready to go in a basket for my writing center! Can't wait for the kids to use!

 

 

On to making my next items for my WRITING CENTER EXTRAORDINAIRE!

 

Check back for more writing center ideas and freebies!