Words floating from the ceiling, words scattered allover the desks, whiteboard, even floor?

This is how I want my room to look when my students enter one day during the first week of school. I am going to gather as many words as I can, print them in large font and colors, laminate them and then scatter them all over. 

I want my students to walk around, pick their favorite(s), and write a story, poem, journal entry- any piece of writing around that word. If they are stuck, I will tell them to gather 10-20 words and create a found poem from the words.

Then I want us to go around a do a quaker share (each person shares a line from their work). Hopefully this will get them into writing, sharing, and words! Maybe they will even learn some new vocabulary words!! 

This year I am going to throw magazines at them and have them cut out words, pictures, write and draw their own words, pictures and symbols to create a collage of things they like, believe in, hate, love, experiences they have had, favorites, memories etc… 

I will have them store this in their writing folders so that they can pull it out when they don’t know what to write about.

How do you have your students share writing territories? 

I think this will help my students to read various genres (since I require them to in the 30 book challenge I do) and create exposure and motivation for reading books they normally may not read. After students have read a book, they will log in to their virtual bookshelf, where they can rate their book, write a review and create tags to track the book. Then Shalfari gives recommendations of other books the student may enjoy. Students can also check out their friend’s “shelf” and see what they are reading. 

I am going to try this, this year to see how it goes. If you aren’t ready to have all your students create their own shelf, you can create your own shelf, rate and review books that you think your students may enjoy. Although I don’t think it will be as motivating as having their own shelf and checking out their friends!! Has anyone else tried something like this out with students? 

Here is part two of my thoughts, see the last post, for my initial thoughts about why teachers and parents should get this book!

This is starred in my copy that I need to keep in mind as I teach writing:

Also found in Your Child’s Writing Life by Pam Allyn was a list of  some amazing websites that foster real and new audiences for writing (aren’t we all looking for authentic publishing opportunities?)

Has anyone used any of these sites in your classroom, and wants to share ?

Check them out, and may they inspire you to get your student’s writing!!  

The book is useful for parents with kids or teachers. It focuses mostly on children from birth to 12 and how we can enhance their writing life and experiences.

Something that struck me from the beginning of the book that immediately struck me was we, as teachers, are looking to create life long readers in our classroom. Do we also think about and want to create life long writers in our classroom?

After reading this book my goal for this upcoming school year is to create life long readers and writers.

Here are some of the highlights from the book that I jotted down as I read it:

• Writing leads to guaranteed improvement in academic achievement.
• “ Writing fosters a child’s emotional growth. Writing is a way to pay better attention to our lives and to build the confidence to trust our opinions and voices.”  Middle school students struggle so much with confidence and voicing their opinions. I have seen in the past that when students share their writing, they are able to voice their feelings, opinions and stories. It helps them to gain confidence in themselves when others respond positively to their writing.
• The book also has a list of Twenty Great books to inspire writing- if nothing else, these titles make it worth it to get the book- add these to your classroom library!
• Another good tip was that older children may be hesitant to share their writing, so sharing writing from other people (yourself, real authors, past students) may help your student to feel more confident in their writing.

One thing I want to mention now, so you can start thinking about how to incorporate it into your classroom is the Scholastic Writing Awards contest. This May, I had an awesome opportunity to go to New York City  to the Scholastic building. I learned a lot about the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and saw first hand at the national awards ceremony at  Carnegie Hall just how amazing this contest really is.

 This is an amazing publishing opportunity for your students to win awards for their writing at a local level, and possibly even national level! If you are located in Northeast Ohio- email me, or leave a comment here, and I will give you more info. on the Scholastic Writing contest at our local level! 

Check out this link for more info. about the awards: http://www.artandwriting.org/

As I read this book I found myself nodding in agreement, raising my eyebrows at other parts and saying oh yeah- that’s a good idea, and starring so may parts that I want to remind myself about, and come back to, to re-read- and that was all in the first 32 pages!!

The majority of the book is an annotated book list. Honestly, I am usually not a fan of a book that has a book list in it because I find that it becomes outdated so quickly, or I have to go online and look up what each book is about because it is just in a category without an annotation. BUT, when I went to this list I was excited! This list was annotated, it was broken down into categories, it was all ready for me to just mark the books I wanted for my classroom library and buy them. No additional research needed- for busy teachers this is just what I needed.

Since I was so excited about this book (I honestly can’t wait until next year to implement some ideas and get some new books into my classroom library- and we haven’t even finished this school year!), I thought I would share with you a brief overview of some of the interesting points that I read about in this book.

This statement really hit me when I read it, “we are not giving boys the books they want to read. We are not giving them enough time to read them… we must give boys choices in their reading lives, and make the classroom an opportunity for readers at different levels and with a variety of reading interests to thrive.”- This is so true!

Here are some of the points that stuck with me as I read:

• We have to give all students, and especially boys, choice in what they read. So much of our curriculum and schooling is geared to girls as learners and readers.
• In order to give students choice in what they read, we have to fill our libraries with a diverse range of topics.
•  Share with students many different read alouds, not just our typical chapter books, but non-fiction books, websites, sections of magazine articles- we need to show kids that reading is all over!
• Your library should have 30% nonfiction books, 30% poetry and 40% fiction. I know I need to up my non-fiction and poetry. Now, with these book lists I know what I want to add to balance my library out more.
• Everyone reads differently, for me it is on my comfy couch curled with a cup of tea, for others it may be standing. When we go to the library, there is an area for the kids to sit on bean bag chairs and read. There are a few students who will stand for 45 min to an hour reading. I always ask them, do you want to sit down? Are you OK? And that is just how they read- not everyone reads the same way!
• I have written about this before, but the whole class novel has convinced boys not to read! “ The whole class novel is the single most deadly bullet aimed directly at boys’ impulse to read.” As teachers we like control of the book, but we have to foster reading and choice through literature circles and independent reading.
• Giving kids time to read independently is important. My kids read on average 35-40 minutes per night. The first few weeks of school I told them to read 10 minutes, and then we slowly increased the time. That way they were able to feel successful as readers and could accomplish their goal.
• Let kids see that you are so proud of them for reading. As kids enter and exit my room, I am always asking them about the book they are reading, how is it? Did they like this part? If they tell me they finished I make a big fuss of them- kids love it!
• “Encourage men to come visit your classroom who have varied reading passions. Let the boys see a strong grown man read a simple picture book, or a tender story about fearing going to sleep.” Love this idea!
• Form an all- boy book club within a class. I would love to ask a male teacher to lead this!
• Let boys read “light” books such as Captain Underpants. This helps boys build stamina, independence and their confidence grows as they find they are able to finish books.

I will be posting more about this book soon…. this post was just getting way too long!!

The Book of Awesome: Snow Days, Bakery Air, Finding Money in Your Pocket, and Other Simple, Brilliant Things by Neil Pasricha.  It is a great book to use in the classroom as either a writing spark or a writing assignment.

In the book are small awesome things that we may find in  you every day lives that makes you stop for a moment and say, Awesome! After each awesome moment is a brief story or explanation- many will leave you nodding your head yeah that is awesome! We have started a tradition in our house where we read one awesome moment at dinner every night- it is a simple reminder to appreciate the small awesome moments in our lives. 

Since the end of the year is coming to a close, I wanted each of my kids to write a page to go into our class Book of Awesome! I am giving  them guidelines, and writing an example myself. I want them to illustrate or design their page in their style and in any way they want that reflects them.I then want to have them share their awesome pages in a gallery walk.

I am excited to see how these turn out, and I will share with you how the kids respond to them!

Below are pictures of the stickers and the papers that they sign when they reach 10-20 and 30 books.

I made stickers (I just ordered circle stickers and created a sticker for every ten books that they read with Print Shop):

Here are the sheets they sign. I just used large poster post it paper:

Hope this answers all your questions!