I don't know about you, but it seems like writing always gets the
shaft in my room. I start off every year with this grand scheme to make
sure my students write daily, yet when something needs to go off of my
schedule, it always seems that this subject is the one on the chopping
block.
Honestly, it just isn't fair to my students.
They will not become better writers unless they are actually writing.
So what I started to do, to ensure that they would write daily, was
begin a Paragraph of the Week.
The basic idea is
simple. The students are given a prompt to write a paragraph about and
they have the week to do it at home. However, I knew that if I just
gave my students a prompt and let them at it....all heck would break
loose. They *needed* some scaffolding and a bit more accountability to
decent sentences than that.
So I thought and thought about what it is that I do to get the kids to proficiently write a paragraph. I thought about how I scaffold it and how it all works together to form a cohesive, thoughtful, structured paragraph. I then broke all of that down into four days worth of writing time for my kids and, viola, Paragraph of the Week was born!
It truly is something that has changed my writing block. Heck, it has changed the way I even view writing. What makes it so amazing? The kids just "get it". They understand how to write now because they see it not as a huge, daunting task, but as a short, systematic structure.
But don't take my word for it. Here it is just for you! I hope you enjoy this as much as I do!
