Skip to main content

Grade 3s start their writing workshop

These last 2 weeks have been busy. The students were introduced to the writing process and it took us over a week to get some pieces published. Though I felt quite drained by the end of it, the end result had me rubbing my hands in glee. Their final published work, (though still with a few minor errors), was a work of art! :) I am so proud of my little ones.

Not only did the students learn about underlining verbs and nouns and adding resepective adverbs and adjectives, they also had to show when to use commas and quotation mark. Having created a checklist right at the beginning of the work shop helped them stay focused.

All the skills they learnt during the course of this term were put to use. Using energetic sentence starters, adding new words from the word wall, and using the thesaurus were among some skills they had to exhibit.

Here are some shots of my students at work.

Where do you start a paragraph?

2nd draft

The writing process, along with the checklist


Working on the 3rd draft


Completely immersed in writing

At the computer center, looking up the thesaursus for new words

PUBLISHED!

A closer look

Our writing wall

I asked my students if they would like to participate in another workshop anytime soon. They gave me a dazed look, and suggested a month's time!  I think creating  a sense of pride in their work is what I was aiming for, along with the understanding that a good piece of writing needs a lot of effort and time.

They keep popping into the class to gaze at their writing. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...