Writing, Writing, Writing

This new writing program has been a big bundle of change from what I am used to! I truly see my kids in a whole different light after watching them write. They built their stamina up where they were writing for 20-30 minutes straight! We still need to work on building up for that 45 minute block, those on demand writings are pretty brutal towards the end :) They also were so receptive to each others writings! They listened and critiqued all day with the kindest words. It was beautiful to let them be the teacher but then also to look at themselves and each other as writers!

I did notice more students had ideas then last year. Last year it was such a struggle to get students to even start writing! This year, the way the program taught them, they always had a topic and if they didn't they had a strategy to find one.

I do struggle with the program a bit because the way it's scaffold if you didn't get it in K-2 then you don't know how to do a lot of the basic writing requirements. Full sentences, punctuation, editing, fluency of sentences. Those were things that we had to have mini lessons on with the whole class, unfortunately that also meant that we went slower through the book. We also stopped on our narrative writing in the middle to work on pen pal letters and some blog writing.

Overall, the program is fantastic and I think it will be even better when I get to see how it progresses over the grade levels. So, how the kids come up from 2nd grade next year and know more about writing and we can start off with topics instead of talking about full sentences.

I'll scan the pictures in I promise...it wasn't working for me before so hopefully it'll work later!

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