I had the honor of working with the first-grade teacher, Mary Frisbee, at Seward Elementary.  Her students created a book about an animal of their choice.  Mrs. Frisbee used Step Up to Writing’s informal outline to help her students organize their writing.  When I attended the publishing party, I saw so many cool things…

Well-Organized Writing/Informal Outline

Student Excitement- I love this outline.  When I ask this student what he liked best about writing his own book, he said his outline.  He specifically said, “It makes me feel like a real author, and my teacher let me cross stuff out!”

When we explicitly teach vocabulary and utilize a word wall, students’ written vocabulary will increase drastically.  Below a first-grade student from Seward used the word substantial. “I’ve got a substantial amount of interesting facts about pandas.” Substantial was a “wow” word on Mrs. Frisbee’s word wall.

Creative Idea:  Mrs. Frisbee let the students select a decorative duct tape to bind the sides of their books together!

I recently had the pleasure of working with individual grade level teams at Seward Elementary!  Our goal was to develop specific writing units from their scope and sequence.  Although it was my job to facilitate the process, I learned so much from this JOurneY!

#1.  As always with careful, strategic planning our confidence as writing teachers increases.

#2.  I am still terrified of kindergarten (another story to be told) even if it is just working with the teachers.  #theyshouldreceivemorepay

#3.  Including hyperlinks in our lesson plans is now a thing (I am not going to lie, this makes this technology idiot develop sweaty hands.)! Thank you, second-grade team!

#4.  Step Up to Writing fits perfectly with a writer’s workshop framework.

#5.  Seward Elementary has a dedicated staff and leadership team to ensure success!

In 19 years of being in education, I have watched various trends and philosophies cycle through.  However, one element has been constant, the concept of modeling.  Isn’t this the most basic, fundamental thing about teaching?  Should it even be called teaching if modeling is not occurring?

Today, my parents celebrate their wedding anniversary.  Their partnership epitomizes a 49-year continual lesson.  Their students are Scott (my much older brother), Jeff (my not-as-good-looking-as-me brother), and me (the absolute favorite child). With repetition, the learning from these lessons becomes permanent.  Just like with some of our students, as a family, we understand that Jeff might require more repetition than Scott and I.   Anyway, here is a list of a few of the lessons modeled and learned…

• Your family comes first, no matter the circumstances.
• When you start a job in your marriage or partnership it will forever be yours.  My mom has been taking out the trash for 49 years!
• The minute an ungrateful child starts complaining about the meal being served, the husband’s job is to use his giant man-sized fingers to issue a flick to the perpetrator.  This gesture making it clear we appreciate the food in front of us and the beautiful woman who prepared the meal.
• A significant height difference doesn’t matter when love is involved.
• The vow “better or worse” truly means better or worse.
• Egg carriers, tractors, and bulls do not always make the best gifts to your wife.
• Prayer and positive thoughts work, and God is always present!
• Flipping a coin will solve any dispute among the children.
• As a couple, if you can still love each other after working cattle together then anything is truly possible.

Editing checklists seem like a great way to get our students to self-edit. But my experience has been one that looks like this …

Your students probably never do this, but mine seem to just check off each task without actually doing it. Therefore, this makes for an unproductive writing conference. More importantly, students never learn to edit their own work.

To eliminate the “checking frenzy”, I started requiring the students to provide evidence of their editing. This not only improved students’ self-editing skills but obviously their writing! I also love the way this implements grammar into the students’ writing versus working on grammar in isolation.

This checklist fits perfectly with Step Up to Writing and The Six Traits. This particular example was used with 6th through 8th grades.  Email me if you are interested in a copy or want to discuss how to modify this for your classroom.  Coming soon to the interactive tab, examples of student notebook pages used with editing and grammar!

My best friend, Teri oozes with joy! Her JOurneY is a chaotic one, one full of five beautiful children.  Yep, I said five!  She reminds me that it’s not like she has ten.  But five: that’s five backpacks to check, five spelling lists, five lunch accounts to keep current, five parent/teacher conferences, five dentist appointments…it never ends!  Did I mention she also works full time and is one heck of a coach, too?  Believe it or not, most days she even fixes her hair! (Notice I said “fixes”…not “washes”! Dry shampoo is her friend.)

To be fair, on any give day Teri looks a little disheveled.  Okay, a LOT disheveled!  I notice many people ask her how she is doing?  Most of us would respond with the standard regurgitation, “I am exhausted and need a break!” But that is not the response you will hear from Teri.  Instead, you’ll hear a very pleasant “I’m fine.” Sure, Teri’s “I’m fine” really means I’m as fine as someone sprawled in the middle of a highway about to be hit by a bus.

So why does she reply with “I’m fine”?  Because she understands the importance of being positive, and that complaining is toxic.  She doesn’t want to poison her day or anyone else’s day with a complaint. She also understands she is FINE, she is alive and each day is a gift! With this New Year, let’s follow Teri’s example and take the “I’m fine” approach with less toxic complaining and more joy oozing!

Purposeful Webs: This was a game changer for my writing teaching JOurneY! Before “Purposeful Webs”, my students’ prewriting strategy looked like the picture below. Often we would create this web as a class! I would be so proud of my students and the 80 bubbles we were able to create on the given prompt. The more spokes the better! I secretly hoped the principal would stroll by the room and see the massive amount of learning occurring in my room! However, as soon as we were done and I was ready to turn students loose on crafting the rough draft, the response was always the same, “Now what?” This is when Mrs. Ferguson would use her inner strength to not go howler monkey on the children. I would inevitable say, “Look at the web, there are plenty of ideas and begin to write!” But it doesn’t work that way for most of our writers!

A purposeful web allows us to give students concrete rules on how to create the web (an excellent prewrite strategy) and more importantly how to transfer the web into writing a rough draft. This tool fits perfectly with Step Up to Writing’s color-coding system for expository/informational text.  I would love to tell you more about this and connect with you, so drop me an email!