Daily 5 - Work on Writing

Heyo! I finally remembered to take some pictures today, so I wanted to share a little more about my journey into the land of the Daily 5!

My kids are independent on Read To Self. It took many hours of model/practice/repeat, but we got there. I only took them as high as 20 minutes because my reading groups are never longer than that. Today, I told each reading group where I wanted them to go. Since I have 4 groups, I had one with me, one with my aide, one at Read To Self, and one group trying their first attempt at an all-out Word Work extravaganza. I've been gradually introducing each activity at my Word Work center. Right now, I'm keeping it simple with: magnetic letters, letter tiles, wiki stix, and letter stamps. They knew to choose one and keep it the whole time. With the exception of 2 little cherubs who were at the back of the room spelling their names with magnetic letters, everyone handled this remarkable well for their first attempt.

This afternoon, I tried 20 minutes of Work on Writing. I've been slowly introducing various activities they can do during this time. I use Lori Rosenberg's I Can Write A...Writing Menu, which I highly recommend if you're setting up a writing center! It's filled with gazillions of options for your kiddos to write. Right now, I've only introduced: letter, postcard, how-to, list, sticker story, and scribble story, which is a huge hit. However... If I read one more scribble story where they turn the scribble into a roller coaster or a mountain, I'll scream.

Anywho, here's what my Work on Writing station has shaped up to be. I got the cart from Big Lots on sale for $25 well spent. Basically, I made a drawer for each option they can choose. They know they can choose ONE of these during each Work On Writing, then they must journal. Some chose to only journal, which made my heart smile.

I decided that the top drawer was going to be their spot to turn in finished writing. There's also a mailbox (which I forgot to take a picture of) that they can mail letters and postcards to friends in the room. In order to turn in work, the students must highlight their name on their paper, mostly because some of the worksheets don't have spaces for names, so they always forget to squeeze it in.

Here's a peek at my writing focus board. The posters about what they can write all came in the writing menu pack. I also plopped up a few of my "I Can" Statements for things we're focusing on in writer's workshop.

I also put our anchor chart that we created about things to write about. The pencil about what do writers write came from The Teacher Wife.

Tomorrow, we're going to start discussing Listen To Reading behaviors by listening to the story from our anthology as a group... we'll see how that goes!! Cross your fingers.