At the beginning of the year writing was often "left behind" (well at least writers workshop. Fromt he beginning of the year we have done response to readings but balancing the time between that and writers workshop just wasn't happening. One way we were fitting in writing was by using the Daily 5 model in our classroom. That was getting students writing however, that was not allowing us an opportunity to model still and teach crafts.
Why was it so hard? The obvious answer from everyone that has been said millions of times this semester is that there is not enough time to fit it all in. To me, that sounds like a challenge. So over the course of the semester through science teaching I decided to integrate some writing. I would have students responding through writing in their science notebooks. As they did that I model correct structure of a sentence and even simple things like how I used the word wall. It was one step in the right direction. Now over these past couple weeks I have begun to do the planning.g In my planning I planned writing. By that I mean I planned writers workshop lessons. We constantly talk about how our kids can't write but we aren't doing very much about it. With that being said, while all these other classes said they are working on opinion pieces and this and that my class was not. I decided based on my class of students and the data I have collected that they need to start from the basics that we never really covered. So I went way back to punctuation. I was surprised that a few of my students didn't even know what a period was!
Needless to say it has only been a couple weeks where I have begun doing some basic lessons with these students and some modeling. I have already seen improvement but we definitely have a long way to go! I am going to consistently put writing into the block of time and plan for it each week. I really feel it is a necessity. When we come back from winter break one of my goals is to have writing occurring everyday a long with writi