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Information Card

• Name• District• Email• Grade Level• What social media are you

comfortable using?

Building Our Community

❖ What is your role in education?

❖ What is your passion?

❖ What is your role in being here

and experience with the units?

Framing Activity

Writer’s NotebooksGetting a Community Started (Donald Graves)

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=222430

A Peek Inside My Notebook:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZE3_j6a59w

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Launching Writing Learning Progression

Unit Purp

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Click to edit Master text styles

PROCESS

PRODUCT

Writing Models for Students

– Getting a Community Started – Graves

– A Peek Inside My Writer's Notebook - Ayres

Reading and Writing

– Community– Expectation that lay

foundation for all units

Principles for Success

Notebook Development

Yes, WE must also write! ❖ In order to teach these units well to our

students, we must be writers ourselves!

❖ Write as yourself, but push yourself to utilize the strategies and tools of each session.

Conce

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Ge

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Writers learn how to generate ideas for Narratives (Memoir) by

first thinking of places that matter to them.

My Map Book

Writer’s generate to create and play with ideas

Generate a map(s) of your own.

➼Look for significant places (memories) in your mind to represent visually.

➼Label your image with the important memories and details.

➼What “big ideas” does the story seem to be about?

Generating – Quick Write

Using an inspiration from your map, jot down the story in your notebook.

Writer’s generate to create and play with ideas

Practice the genre of your grade level

❧ 6th – personal narrative with an emphasis on building skills to engage the reader by sharing both the writer’s perspective and experience in meaningful ways.

❧ 7th – memoir with an emphasis on an event that had a profound impact on your life and who you are because of this event.

❧ 8th – narrative poem with an emphasis on personal expression and sharing an ideas that matters.

Creating a Memoir

➘ What is a memoir?

➘ How is it different than a personal narrative?

➘ Other ways to generate personal stories that could get to memoir writing?

Session 2 Memoir Topics

Writer’s work in partnershipCreating a comfort level with partnerships is essential to this unit and those ahead. Take the time to build this community.

Turn to your shoulder partner and share a bit of what you are doing with them. You may consider sharing one of the following:

– A place on your map– Why you chose to expand your thinking in this particular area– What you are trying to do as a writer.

Partners give one piece of specific, supportive feedback to each other. Where might they stretch out their piece?

Debrie

f➘ How do writers

use their notebooks to generate, gather and record ideas for writing?

➘ What strategies do writers use to figure out how to express their stories that matter?

Conce

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Wr i t

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Session 3

Memoir writers explore events or series of related events that remain lodged in memory and reconstruct those events to reflect personal significance.

The Bigger The Moment, The Smaller You Write (Ralph Fletcher)

What am I going to Write about?

Practice using these tools to organize thoughts into

possible seed ideas

Teachers confer to know, understand and assess their students.

Questions to allow you to “Research, Decide, Teach”

● What are you working on today as a writer?

● Can you show me that part?● “Today I’m going to teach you” (1

thing!)● What are you planning to do next in

your writing?

Debrie

f ➘ What will be difficult for students when determining a memoir topic?

➘ What strategies do we use to transform our writing and focus on the significance in our small moments in order to draw a reader’s attention?

Memoir Structure ChartSession 6

Consider this strategy for growing more writing out of students

Choosing a strategy discussed, draft a memoir of an important place to you based on your map (and for later use in your classroom).

Drafting

Debrie

f➘ How might the

strategy you tried work for students?

➘ What difficulties do you anticipate?

Conce

pt #3

Writers revise and edit and with the understanding that revision is about finding and developing potentially great writing, sometimes by adding more to the heart of the piece, rather than ‘fixing errors’.

Mark 2 places where you would like to think more.

Possible strategies:❑ Stretch/Squeeze strategy

❑Memoir writers make use of description that creates vivid pictures in the minds of the reader. The most common types of figurative language are similes, metaphors, and personification.

What revision strategies

would you encourage students

to play with?

Session 9: Revision

Debrie

f➘ How might

revision work look different now than in the past?

➘ What might be challenges students and teachers will face with revision work?

Conferring

❑ What are you working on as a writer?

❑ What are you trying to do as a writer?

❑ What will you do today in your writing?

Teacher Role

TCRWP Conferring Video Clips:

❑ Writing in the Moment Conference

http://vimeo.com/55954399

❑ Providing Critical Feedback

http://vimeo.com/55966102

Two different approaches to teaching similar skills within writing conference.

Debrie

f➘ How can

conferring with others affect the outcome of our stories?

➘ How do writers improve writing skills by studying and conferring about work from other authors?

Asses

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Formative Assessments

Study samples of student drafts or writers notebooks

Examine conferring checklists and revision/editing checklists

Questions to consider:

➘ How do we use these tools to guide instruction (plan future mini-lessons, form strategy groups, glean conferring teaching points, etc.)?

➘ What other tools do we find helpful as formative assessments?

Summative Assessments

Examine assessment rubric and student samples of final drafts

Questions to consider:

➘ How do we assess growth?

➘ How might you translate both the process and product into grades?