About the Authors

By: Katie Wood Raywith Lisa B. Cleaveland

Writing workshop with Our Youngest Writers

A child who is gaining control over the conventions of written language and who is using language to craft literature

End of The Year

From the first day students should think of writing workshop as a time when they get to make stuff

Making stuff drives all of our teaching with our youngest writers

Make books Supplies are everything they represent worlds

of possibilities for students Create a context that feels familiar to them Being able to choose activities from a range of

options is very important for young children

Making Stuff

When only have a Journal page or a space for a illustration and a few lines students tend to write a small amount

Making Books With Multiple pages, students have seen books so they know their should be something on every page

Encourages volume Illustrations help them make important

meanings Students work is so important to them, listen to

them explain it

Making Stuff Helps Them Do Bigger Work

Students thinking of themselves as authors of books is the starting point to learn like writers

Think more about just the text, start to think of the meaning

When students see new types of writing and notice things they will try to incorporate into own writing

Eventually learn they need to read the kind of think they are trying to write

Making Stuff Helps Students Read Like Writers

Free writing is the only kind of writing there is in young writers

All about creating a space in the day when children are very free to experiment, explore, and approximate with writing.

No Journal Writing With Young Writers

Countless pieces of writing in many different forms and genres

Represent ideas with illustrations Generated spelling for hundreds of words Use ordinary words over and over Made decisions about punctuation Figured out how to begin and end pieces Used writing in other subjects and to help

them learn to do things outside of writing workshop

Children Need Experience with Writing

Build up enthusiasm for the writing workshop that they will be doing everyday

Need a general understanding of what they will be doing and what workshop time is for

Show examples of work from students in the past

Understanding the Work

How everything will work in the room during workshop time

Perform a walk through with students

Understanding Space

Get tools ready Find the best place for you to work You may talk- asking a friend for help,

sharing idea… Write until time runs out Be ready to listen

Establishing Guidelines

Students need to know what it means to be finished with a piece of writing

Children should be able to finish and move on to something new without a teacher’s intervention

Many options for where finished work goes

Finished Writing

Learning about how our language works should happen all day

Need to supply a rich variety of activities and engagements ◦ * reading aloud◦ * talking into our routines◦ * word study◦ * center work◦ * songs and games◦ * writing to support other work

Learning About Language All Day Long

Everything in the classroom should be a learning opportunity and create a surrounding of print resources

Use to reference◦ * Alphabet charts◦ * number charts◦ * color charts◦ * calendars◦ * word walls◦ * etc.

Environmental Support

Every time we read aloud to children we are teaching writing

Reading Aloud

We need to believe that students come to school already on their way learning to write

Get students started writing away and see what they can do

Keep them writing so that they learn more about writing and will hopefully be able to use writing successfully in their lives someday

Where do We Start?

Minilessons help create that “somebody could try this” energy around children's writing.

Children make connections from seeing something in a book to imagining it as a specific possibility for someone in the room.

Make children feel like they are writing books, staple some pages together so they feel like they are making books.

When they feel like they make books they look at books like they can do the same.

Make Students feel like they can write books.

The purpose of the minilesson is not to establish some writing for the children to do during writing workshop each day.

Instead the purpose is to fill the room with ideas for how they might do that bookmaking better and better.

Each minilesson should end with the students envisioning a new possibility for their work.

Minilessons

Topics for minilessons can be the same in grades 1-12 but what they write about and how they write will be different.

Topics

The goal of a minilesson is that students develop:◦ A sense of self as a writer◦ Ways of readying the world as writers◦ Ways of reading text like writers◦ And a sense of audience

Developing…

What are these books about?◦ This questions help us get at the topic potential in

this genre How do we think the authors get the ideas

for these books?◦ This question helps us think about how we might

choose a topic for this genre. What do we imagine the authors had to do

to write these books.◦ This questions helps us think about what work (if

any) writers have to do.

Questions to ask

The purpose of our whole-class teaching in fact, is to plant ideas and help children see them as real possibilities.

Ideas for writing

Catching children in the act of trying things on their own is our only true way of knowing whether they are getting it- the it being all the writing curriculum we are offering up as possibilities in our teaching.

Are they getting it?

Looking at a finished piece of writing we can see what the children know, but watching and listening to them as they write can help us capture so much more insight and information, especially in terms of understanding their process.

Assessment

Should be between 5-10 minutes Purpose of these conferences is to offer

children individualized instruction in their writing work.

Writing conferences

At first don’t even look at what the student has. ◦ Talk instead

This is to have the student feel like they know what they are writing about and know it well

Help the children to remember to put spaces between their words

Also to reread and reread often◦ So they won’t forget what they have already

written

What to do during a conference

Help the children become more independent in their ability to get the words down on the page

Help generate better and better spelling for words they are using

Set specific agendas for individual children so to get over some hump in their writing

Goal of the conference