Writing Process Focus

For our final get-together as a community, BOPDs are having a publishing party that highlights the writing process. Students needed to choose a story to feature in their display showing the writing process. This meant having to go back through all their writing pieces, choosing one, and then finding ways to document and explain the steps of the writing process.

A Final Reflection

BOPDs began writing a reflection of their learning for their yearend reports. As with any writing, it followed a process. The class had a brief review of the writing process, and created a map reflecting the step-by-step progress. For the planning step, Ms Montilla invited her students to draw "a polygon with ten sides", to which others replied, "A star!". After drawing the a huge star on their notebooks, they were asked to think of ten things that make them a superstar in Third Grade. From those ten items, each student chose for which they would write a reflection. Using our class method of 'two dogs and a target', BOPDs started thinking about how they have grown this year, and what their next steps are. These reflections will be included in their yearend reports which they said forms an integral part of the feedback for families.

Writing Identity

Ms Montilla has been meeting one on one with BOPDs to talk about their writing. We have just concluded writing the first draft of our samples and we are using these as a point of reflection about who we are as authors. After our discussion, BOPDs write a reflection that will go home alongside their samples.

It's in the Planning

BOPDs chose from three prompts for their writing samples. Students began by planning what their piece would be about. One student justified his choice of writing a narrative because the photograph used as a prompt gave him, "a billion ideas".

Drafts

BOPDs started the first draft of their writing. This is our second writing sample of the year and again, we will conduct writing conferences next week and eventually send them home to share with families.

Opinions

BOPDs played game that involved two players who needed to determine whether a statement was an opinion or a fact. It was a fun game and we discovered qualities of each kind of a statement. A fact is true and an opinion might not be true for everyone. A fact can be proven and an opinion can not. Using then what we learned about opinions, we wrote about who we think is the most interesting character in the book, "Wonder". Following the steps of the writing process helped us share our thoughts and next week we will read each other's opinions to start a discussion. The student below gave an excellent beginning to his viewpoint on why Julian Albans is the most interesting character in the book.

Questions for an Author

To restart our thinking as authors, we composed questions for our visiting author Alex London. He will be in ISM for a whole week to share his expertise and love of writing. Some of us have read his books and after watching a short clip of him talking about about one of his books, we thought about what we wanted to ask him.

Boring and interesting

BOPDs are excited to share their vacation stories. We decided to make the experience different by following the structure of a narrative but using fictional names to relay our experiences so that classmates will need to guess whose vacation they are reading about. To do this, we spoke about how to make our stories interesting. Using four sentences from the book that Ms Ness uses for her read-aloud with us, we analyzed them and graphed them on a continuum with 'boring' and 'interesting' as endpoints. In this exercise we learned that the more detail a sentence has, the more interesting it is to the reader. Also that the most interesting sentence we encountered was one that had dialogue. We applied this idea to our writing and look forward to our guessing game!

Contraptions

Based on the features of a non-fiction text they analzyed, BOPDs chose features that they thought necessary to relay information about the contraption that they made for their experiment on force. BOPDs thought that a way to test if their information is sufficient is if they could challenge parents to replicate their contraption. Are you up for a challenge?

Author's Headlines

At the end of writers' workshop, we sit and listen to a classmate share an excerpt of their piece. We enjoy this process and share feedback. To finish off, we try to capture a point of learning and express it as a headline.

Revising based on reflections

BOPDs played a game of sequencing the steps of the writing process based on a writing sample. We had a rich discussion and came to a consensus on the order of the steps. We then focused on revising based on the reflections that we made about our own writing samples. We are excited to improve our stories.

Writing and improvement

BOPDs engaged in writing conferences this week to talk about their samples. Ms Montilla shared her thoughts and they in turn, reflected about their stories. Today we broke into groups to read samples, analyze them to match the comments that were given. We came together as a class to share the justify our choices and to learn from each other about how to improve our writing. We all agreed that our stories are good, but feedback allows us to make them better.

Writing Samples

BOPDs underwent the process of choosing, planning and writing this week for writing samples. We started by looking at different choices for prompts, with each one garnering excited ideas from students. The next step was planning their story through brainstorming and mapping. The final step was writing a draft as best they could. BOPDs are aware that this was a process for assessment. Writing samples will be analyzed and results will be used as a learning map. Students will have a chance to share these with families when it is sent home in October.

I write because...

Ms Montilla brought a collection of journals that she owns. Using a thinking routine called, "See Think Wonder", students shared their thinking upon seeing a stack of books in front of them. Many wondered about how long the journals were, and some asked to read some entries to find out what it was about. The class spoke about why we write and shared with each other their reasons.