Sharing Writing Success

I felt very brave one day, and decided to try the full on Writer’s Workshop concept. My students already knew about WWS and the expectations of the classroom during this time. As a class, I asked students for different ideas for writing. We drafted a pretty decent list, and I threw in a few ideas of my own. The students were actually excited at the thought of writing something new like a script for a TV show or creating their own comic book, instead of the traditional three to five paragraph essay. Before I let my students start writing though, I wanted them to sit at their desk and think for three minutes about the different things they could write, and I encourage them to write down anything that came to their mind. While they were creating their personal list, I project my computer screen for my students to see and wrote a list of my own. After the three minutes was up, I selected for my students one of the ideas off my list. I decided to write a personal narrative about my experience getting stitches. Asking for the class input, we decided on the best graphic organizer for my writing. I modeled how I would fill out my graphic organizer. I was a bit self conscious about it because I knew my writing and spelling was not my best, but I guess that let the students know that nothing is perfect the first time around.  Finally, after many sighs and questions of when they can start, I graciously let off on their own.

   I was very skeptical of this at first because I knew I would have students who would either write nothing or would want to write Haiku after Haiku because it was easy; the challenge was trying to figure out what to get those kids to write. I was glad that I had gotten to know my students pretty well by this time, so when I found one student sitting at his desk doing nothing I knew I had to help him brainstorm something to write. Luckily I knew this student loved football, was obsessed with the game, so I talked to him about football. We decided he could create his own football newspaper article. By the end of it he was making up different teams, lineups, and summarizing games that he had made up. This typically awkward, shy student was actually meeting with other boys in the class and sharing his writing. 

  As the end of the hour neared I decided to select a few students to share their writing thus far. It was very surprising to see the number of seventh graders raise their hands to read aloud their writing. I was actually impressed with those who volunteered, their writing was original and much better than I had predicted. Eventually I had to cut them off before the bell rang to dismiss them. The next day, kids came to class asking if they would be able to share their writing. This actually became a great revising tool because when the students read their work aloud to a friend they would catch their errors and were able to fix the confusing sentences. I truly enjoyed doing these lessons, but still struggled with the continuation of it. I did, and still do, not know how to take a grade for it, what to assess when students are writing thirty different pieces, and what to do when five students are “finished” while fifteen are still on their first draft. I guess I am able to start the process, but still struggle with the middle and end of Writer’s Workshop. Maybe this is just something that takes a few years to get the handle of....I hope!