| To finish out my time in Kindergarten, we used an idea from the book Conferring with Young Writers by Kristin Ackerman & Jennifer McDonough. You can see on the above anchor chart, we used this powerfully resourceful strategy to help students generate ideas for small moments. It was an amazing day, I saw a student who had only ever written about Mario and Luigi (fully convinced they are true and a part of his small moments) write about playing with his dog in the backyard. Small win for these writing teachers! This anchor chart will be powerful and students will connect to it. I was totally in awe as I taught that day, watching 22 little kindergarten brains open up at the idea that they have so many stories to tell.
In third grade, I continue to be empowered by the idea: if students can speak it, they can write it. I have enjoyed watching the transformation of these readers, who are writers responding to their reading in Wonders, to share opinions using powerful pieces of text evidence. They collected evidence on sticky notes centered around the essential question, placed it appropriately on the discussion web, then used their reading partner to talk through their opinion, all based on text evidence. I modeled my thinking for students and then they were off to write. I am so looking forward to their post data collection to see how far they’ve come in written responses using text evidence. There are so many routines in place to support these readers in achieving our content standards, it is wonderful. |
