A Note from Your Writing Committee - Starting Off!

Good Morning, Everyone,

Welcome back to the start of an exciting school year.  Your writing committee has been busy this summer preparing for the implementation of the Calkins Writing Workshop in the K-5 classrooms.

Today you will receive your materials for the upcoming year.  The district has purchased the Calkins Units of study for each grade level, as well as a copy of assessment text, Writing Pathways.  Together, these two texts will provide us a framework as we implement the writing workshops in our classrooms.  I understand several of the teachers on our team have worked with the program before and  we are all looking forward to having them share their experiences with us.

We will be meeting as a team on October 13 as a team.  Between now and then:

•  please administer the narrative prompts to your students and bring them to the meeting.  We will score them there.  Please use your your copy of Writing Pathways to administer the assessments.  Be sure to follow the directions carefully and take notes on writing behaviors as directed.  Please bring your copy of Writing Pathways to the meeting as well.

• please review your copy of A Guide to the Writing Workshop, appropriate for your grade level, and come prepared to discuss the highlights of the book as it relates to your class.  If you have any questions you would like to discuss as a team, please bring them to the meeting.

•  please review the framework below.  It is a quick outline of Calkins' workshop in general.  I will also post it on the Writing 2016-2017 on the Vinalhaven Blog.  You can leave any comments or suggestions you have there.

Finally,  please take a minute and go to the Vinalhaven Blog and familiarize yourself with it.  Please sign up to follow the blog by e-mail.  This way, you will receive notices of when something is posted.  You will find the gadget to do this on the right hand side of the blog.  It looks like this:

Thank you for your time.

Wishing you a great year.

Please don't hesitate to call me if you have a question on need assistance.

See you soon,      Darlene   

Vinalhaven Writing Workshop

Mini-lesson Format

Topic : _____________________   Session:  #____           Date:_______ 

Getting Ready:
Connection:
*Name the Teaching Point:
Teaching:
Active Engagement:
Link:

                  

Conferring and Small Group:
Conferring - Students:	Small Groups – Students:
Mid-Workshop Teaching:
Share:

Welcome Back!

Good Morning,

If you are viewing this photo of your writing committee, you have accepted the invitation to join our blog!  Congratulations!  We know that you will enjoy reviewing the materials we have saved as well as keeping up on the latest happenings in writing at the Vinalhaven School.

Your writing committee worked on June 20-22 in order to map out plans for the writing program K-5 for the upcoming year.

We are eager to share our plans with you and hear your feedback.  Over the next few weeks, I will be posting information here. 

Please feel free to leave comments!

Please stay tuned!

See you soon, Darlene

Some good ideas on conferencing, courtesy of Choice Literacy.

February 20, 2016 - Issue #490 If you are having trouble reading this newsletter, click here for a Web-based version.     Act the Way You Want to Feel   We won’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.                                                                          Gretchen Rubin   When I got married, my mom gave me a piece of advice that I have never forgotten: Act the way you want to feel. She explained, if you want to feel loving toward your husband, act loving toward him. As I was happily preparing for my wedding, I couldn’t imagine a time that I would ever not feel loving toward my husband, but I stored the advice away. I soon discovered that as much as I love my husband, I don’t always feel that way 24 hours a day. The small irritations--a task left undone, a toilet seat left up--as well as the big annoyances--a disagreement over a bathroom remodeling project--can sometimes put a damper on my affection. Whenever I find myself hanging on to those negative feelings, I always return to my mom’s advice: Act the way you want to feel. And it really does work; your behavior changes your attitude. It’s really hard to feel annoyed with my husband when I’m giving him a warm hug. I was recently reading Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin when I came across this sentence: “It’s easy to assume that we act because of the way we feel, but to a great degree, we feel because of the way we act.” Here was my mom’s old advice in a different context. I had always applied it to my marriage, but it got me thinking about how it could apply to my habits at work. At the beginning of the school year, I had made a goal to make a regular habit of conferring with my high school students about their reading. I scheduled conference days into my plan book as a way to ensure that I made the time to talk with my students and it worked great! I felt so empowered by this new habit--conferring was making me more connected to my students and more in tune with their reading successes and struggles. Then other things started getting in the way--projects that needed more time, unexpected schedule changes, and snow days. By midterm, I had fallen off the wagon with conferring. It had happened gradually, but finally one of my students asked, “When are you going to have time to talk to us about our books again?” I knew something had to be done. I was feeling defeated and, worst of all, disconnected from my students. That’s when I applied my mom’s advice. If I want to feel more connected to students, I need to act connected to students--it’s nearly impossible to feel disconnected from a student when I am talking with him one-on-one. This small, simple shift in perspective gave me the push I needed to make time for conferring once again. What I’ve come to realize is that “act the way you want to feel” is a way of preventing negative feelings from robbing you of the positive experiences in life, whatever the context may be. This week we look at notetaking in writing conferences. Plus more as always -- enjoy! Gretchen Schroeder Contributor, Choice Literacy Free for All   [For sneak peeks at our upcoming features, quotes and extra links,  follow Choice Literacy on Twitter: @ChoiceLiteracy or Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChoiceLiteracy or Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/choiceliteracy/]      Mandy Robek shares how she has revised the records she keeps during writing conferences: http://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=1339 With more than 75% of students receiving extra support in a high-need district, Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan struggled to find tools to help teachers collaborate around student needs. Enter the personal conferring notebook, a terrific vehicle for teachers to record insights about students working with multiple teachers and specialists: http://leadliteracy.com/articles/82 Ruth Ayres asks, Is Writing Essential? Her answer might surprise you: http://www.ruthayreswrites.com/2016/01/is-writing-essential.html Ruth explores the basics of writing workshops in her latest online course, beginning on March 2. The course includes three webcasts, a DVD, a book, videos, print resources, and personal responses from Ruth. For details and registration information, click on the link below: http://www.choiceliteracy.com/workshops-detail.php?id=66

This article on resilience in learning parallels the writing conference thinking process. Courtesy of theguardian. Enjoy

The science of resilience: how to teach students to persevere 

 

 

The science of resilience: how to teach students to persevere

 

Neurologist and teacher Judy Willis shares three simple techniques to help teachers build resilience in their students

 

gu.com/p/4fg33/stw|By Judy Willis

Reflections from the Wrting Committee - 2015-2016

Thinking about our work on Narrative Writing Samples, as well as the reading we have done in Calkins' Writing Pathways, please take a few moments and reflect on ideas you have had about using the rubrics, benchmark papers, data, suggested teaching tools, and suggested teaching ideas in your classroom.  Please describe what you are planning on implementing and why.  If you have already implemented some changes or "tweaked" some practices, please include these.  

Choose what you think is most important to share with us.


Please complete them by January 18, 2016.


I look forward to reading these reflections.

Notes on Writing Committee meeting on December 12, 2015.

The writing committee met on December 14, 2015.  Prior to the meeting, teachers collected narrative writing samples K-12 and chose a high, medium, and low example using the rubric.  As a committee, they reviewed writing samples using Calkins’ rubrics.  The trends identified early on (see below) were concerns throughout the writing we reviewed, as well as the last two bullets.

Students need to:

•  be able to write a complete sentence early on.
• be able to create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
• be able to write for sustained periods of time.
•  be able to revise their work.
•  be able to use upper case and lower case letters correctly.
• be able to use transition words.
• be able to write using correct grammar.
• be able to write a paragraph.

Teachers need to:

• consider administering the assessment to small groups so they can scribe as the students write, as well as observe writing behaviors included in the rubrics.
• consider using three pieces of paper for writing stories – one for the beginning, middle and end of a story.  This might help students understand the concept.
• Use a common vocabulary when discussing writing.

 
 

Helana shared high school samples with the committee as well as her first draft of her rubric for grades 10-12.  In response to the directive to create consistency across the grade levels, she is revising the rubric.  Thank you, Helana.

The writing committee will meet on January 21, 2016.

Thank you all for your hard work.

Energizing Writing Workshops courtesy of Choice Literacy.

November 7, 2015 - Issue #457 If you are having trouble reading this newsletter, click here for a Web-based version.       Little Notebooks   Memory is a complicated thing -- a relative to truth, but not its twin.                                                                                  Barbara Kingsolver On the table where I sit each morning with my coffee -- thinking and dreaming, writing and reading -- is a small stone engraved with these words: The biggest lie that I tell myself daily is ”I don’t need to write that down. I’ll remember it.” It’s a reminder to me of all the good ideas, large and small, I’ve lost because I haven’t written them down. Beau Biden died tragically young earlier this year, while he was serving as the attorney general in Delaware. One of the memories shared at his funeral was of Beau listening intently whenever any citizen accosted him with a concern, and then pulling out a small notebook to write it down. I love that image of a notebook always on hand, a physical reminder that he would literally carry someone’s concerns with him. It’s a stress reliever for me to write things down. It takes any idea or issue out of mental space and into physical space to deal with later. I keep little notebooks in the car, next to the bed, and in many coat pockets. But writing ideas down when they come is easier said than done. The problem is that ideas often come when we are on the move -- something about getting up and walking across the room, or taking a shower, or driving in the car shakes and loosens the mind. It’s this reverie that allows thoughts to mingle in new ways, and inspiration to emerge.  And then we scramble (because we aren’t at a desk or table) for any scrap of paper to write it down. That’s why I probably have at least a half dozen notepads and notebooks in use at any given time -- it’s impossible to keep track of all of them as they are moving from car to house, coat pockets to coffee tables. I no longer worry about any kind of order to them, or finishing one before I start another. What matters most is to tell myself the truth -- if I don’t write it down when inspiration strikes, it is likely to be lost forever.   This week we look at ways to energize writing workshops. Plus more as always -- enjoy!   Brenda Power Founder, Choice Literacy       Free for All     [For sneak peeks at our upcoming features, quotes and extra links,  follow Choice Literacy on Twitter: @ChoiceLiteracy or Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChoiceLiteracy or Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/choiceliteracy/]      Mary Lee Hahn finds 15 minutes of writing on Friday builds fluency and confidence in her fifth-grade students, and gives her a wealth of formative assessment data at the same time: http://www.choiceliteracy.com/articles-detail-view.php?id=1933 Shari Frost shares children's picture books that are about characters who write. These are wonderful mentor texts for writing minilessons: http://leadliteracy.com/articles/190 The Sharing Our Notebooks blog from Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is a terrific resource for teachers or anyone interested in how writers capture and hone ideas in notebooks: http://www.sharingournotebooks.amylv.com/ Ruth Ayres is leading a new Choice Literacy online course on the fundamentals of writing workshops in December. This 12-day course includes readings, videos, webcasts, and personal response from Ruth. Details and registration guidelines are available at this link: http://www.choiceliteracy.com/workshops-detail.php?id=66   Create a DVD professional library instantly by ordering the 24 DVD Collection and save 50% off the list prices of individual titles. The bundle includes over 40 hours of video and features Jennifer Allen, Aimee Buckner, "The Sisters" (Gail Boushey and Joan Moser), Clare Landrigan, Tammy Mulligan, Franki Sibberson, and many other master teachers working in classrooms with children. Choice Literacy members receive an additional discount of $100 off the sale price: http://www.choiceliteracy.com/books-dvds-detail.php?id=63