Literacy and the Arts Festival

It has been a wonderful year of learning, thinking and creating.

As you view this slideshow of our work, you will see evidence of a
culture of learners who 'show what they know" and take pride in all that they do.

National Day of Writing ~ Celebrating Writing

The U.S. Senate recently passed a resolution declaring October 20, 2009, the first National Day on Writing. The resolution encourages all schools to join in the celebration by submitting writing to the National Gallery of Writing.

The National Gallery of Writing is a virtual online gallery that is collecting writing from all kinds of people all over the world. The gallery will accept stories, poems, recipes, emails, blogs, even audio, video, and artwork for submission.

The Senate resolution confirms the important role that writing has in our school Literacy Plan for the 21st Century as well as in our lives. Writing well is a 21st Century skill that can not be neglected.

The National Council of Teachers of English recognizes that literacy practice in the 21st Century is in the midst of profound change and has issued the following recommendations:

• Our schools and our nation need to recognize and validate the many ways we all are writing.
• We need to develop new models of writing, design a new curriculum supporting those models, and create models for teaching that curriculum.
• We need to make sure that all students have the opportunity to write and learn in intellectually stimulating classrooms.
• We need to recognize that out-of-school literacy practices are as critical to students’ development as what occurs in the classroom and take advantage of this to better connect classroom work to real-world situations that students will encounter across a lifetime.

It's not too late for you to participate in this global celebration of writing. The National Gallery of Writing is accepting submissions until June 2010.

Read more about how to submit your writing or view a video demonstration.

Need some good ideas to get started? Read about ways teachers from the National Writing Project celebrated with their students or visit the National Gallery of Writing and read some of the submissions on display. NCTE also has some good Tips for Writers.

Please join this global celebration and experience the power of writing!

Contact me if you would like help creating your own classroom gallery in the National Gallery of Writing.

WRITING WORKSHOP: Planning a Unit of Study

What do you want to teach your students how to do next in writing? Persuade? Describe? Explain? As teachers of writing guided by curriculum and Grade Level Expectations, we know what to teach. The challenge comes in deciding the best way to do it.

Katie Wood Ray has written a wonderful book called Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop that outlines a framework for designing units of study based on inquiry. The framework involves these steps:

• Gathering Texts
• Setting the Stage
• Immersion
• Close Study
• Writing Under the Influence

Katie's framework reminds us about the importance of immersing students in the genre by providing lots of opportunity for students to read mentor texts. Close study of the genre allows students to notice and identify the characteristics of the genre before they begin to write. This 'joint construction of knowledge' engages students and empowers them to tackle new writing challenges. An inquiry based unit looks very different than one that begins with a teacher explanation of the genre's characteristics and a rubric.

Try it and you will discover that students who participate in inquiry based genre studies are successful and motivated writers.

Preview Chapter 3 of Katie's book.
Read Write Think inquiry based lesson plan: Investigating Animals: Using Nonfiction for Inquiry-based Research
Thinking Through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshop 4-12 by Heather Lattimer