The Sunrise Story

Morning Announcements. The communications classes I'm teaching have taken over the morning announcements or the news, as we call it.  I have a confession about this...I was nervous about it and kind of dreading it. I had no experience and no idea what to do or how to make it good. I'm so glad that I stuck with it because it's amazing! How did we begin? We watched the news and talked about previous experiences with announcements and recording ourselves. We used FlipGrid almost every single class to get used to being on camera. We spent hours observing and rehearsing until the day we did it for real. Communications is the last block of the day, so we record the news the day before and push it out to the classrooms the next morning. Students work in pairs or groups of threes. They get their assignment, their press pass, and they have a limited amount of time to record their segments. They search the building for the very best place to record.  It's been two w...

I took a chance and tried something new today. We've been rehearsing and learning new vocabulary words for a few weeks and today we were showing off our knowledge...aka it was time for our summative assessment. I decided to give them three choices to show me that they owned these words. They could use the word in a sentence or write the definition or they could sketch or doodle the meaning of the word. I was worried about the last choice. My worry wasn't for my students, my worry was for me. I wondered if I would I be able to see the mastery of the word in their drawing? The answer came to me in a resounding YES! It made reading over these answers interesting and fun too. I love sixth-grade readers! Here are some of their sketches and doodles! Enjoy...               I celebrate choice in assessment. I celebrate the creativity of my sixth-grade readers and writers. 

Yesterday was the National Day on Writing! It's my favorite holiday...well, maybe other than National Notebook Day in May. We were busy writing and celebrating writing in room 734.  We started with a read aloud. It reminded us about the importance of telling our story. The new picture book, " Malala's Magic Pencil ". I shared magic pencils with the students and we were off! Choices included graffiti wall writing about #WhyIWrite or about books about writing. Students could write with unusual tools including blocks, play-dough, magnets, or a letter board. Some students wrote stories together, some wrote poetry, some created quotes and others found their own way. We tweeted our writing like crazy! The excitement was palpable. One student said, "It's so much fun, it feels like the last day of school!"  The rest of the story will be told in pictures. There are lots of pictures. I tried to capture as much of this day as possible...

Today we will celebrate writing in room 734. We are writers. We will create new writing. We will share our writing in new and creative ways. We will celebrate ourselves as writers. Writing is powerful. Words change the world. Our time together will begin with the story of a writer who changed her world and soon the world beyond her own, Malala. The picture book, Malala and the Magic Pencil, is a perfect read aloud for this day.  I celebrate writing. I celebrate our writers.  I celebrate magic pens and pencils.  Please come back to see the results from our day of celebration. How will you celebrate today? 

It's been too long since I've written in this space. I've been writing. I've been writing a lot, but blogging has slipped away for a few weeks. I'm back and I missed this space. Writing feeds me. Lately, I've been writing pages and pages in my notebook and I've been working on my book, so the time slipped away. What's missing from those two other kinds of writing is an audience. I miss sharing my words with others and receiving feedback. Here I am today, showing up and writing.  This year I set a goal for myself to work on developing the reader's notebook into a more meaningful and engaging tool in our classroom. As with any goals, it's a journey. We are working hard with our reading and showing up to our reader's notebooks a few times a week. I want it to be a daily commitment, but I know we can get there.  This week, we were discussing different kinds of conflicts that we witness as readers. I invited the students to create a noteboo...

We've launched notebooks. We write in our notebooks every day.  I collected notebooks for a first check. Spending time in these pages inspired me.  I get to know my sixth-graders as writers and I get to know their interests and passions. Notebook writing and reading their writing is certainly something to celebrate today!  The rest of this post will be pages from their notebooks. They've given me permission to share. You are in for a treat! Enjoy... Thank you to Ruth Ayres for providing this space for sharing our celebrations. Please join us and share your own!