Teacher Mom: Digging Into...Writing

Welcome Back! How much have you all been LOVING summer break! I know that I have been LOVING the sun, the beach, and special time with my little lady! I am taking a little time today to share with you all a little more about my classroom and my teaching...

WRITING!

This past year, we started using the REVISED Lucy Calkins writing program. My district was AMAZING and only required us to complete the narrative and opinion units last year. This year we will have to complete those two, plus the informational text unit. The fourth unit will be added in the following year. This has allowed us to really OWN the curriculum and I have even been able to create some complimentary products!

I actually like the Lucy program. I do think it can be a bit language heavy for the little ones especially the ELL's in the bunch, so we took the most important pieces and made sure to fit those in. We also split some of her lessons into two days, if we felt the kiddos needed more time.

I really liked the narrative/small moment unit. I felt like my kids were better writers and knew more about themselves as writers than they ever had before. I felt similarly about the opinion unit, though the collections bend did NOT go well...

So, what would I change...

First, next year when we teach collections we plan to have class collections that we can use (games/toys/books). We are doing this because when we asked kids to bring in their own we got things like dimes, address labels, and gimp - It's VERY hard to write an opinion about the best dime/gimp/address label in a collection when they are all the same!!!

Second, we found that we would like to be able to better meet the needs of our kiddos and the mini-lesson tends to meet the needs only of the middle kids. We are going to group our kids (flexibly of course) and separate them for writing among the 3 classrooms. This will allow us to teach to the more focused needs in front of us. It will also allow for the teachers who support kids (ELL, SPED) to concentrate their needs in one room rather than scattered support across all three rooms.

I have made mini-anchor charts to go along with the Lucy units for Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. These could be used for any writing units that match the common core - They focus on the elements needed for all of the writing genres (narrative, opinion, information).