Introducing...

Remember a few posts back when I shared a bit about our classroom's Writer's Workshop time? The students love, love, LOVE this portion of our morning and groan (not kidding) when I say, "Let's wrap it up writers!"

Well, I'd like to introduce you to a new aspect of our writing fun...

THE AUTHOR'S CHAIR!!

To most people it would simply look like a black chair with the letter A and other words painted on it and donned with ribbon and green tulle. However, to the students in our classroom, this chair is a huge compliment to their writing. Here's how it goes down...we open our Writer's Workshop time with a brief (about 10 minute) mini-lesson and then the students are told, "Let's go be writers!" and they return to their seats and begin their writing. While they are busy being authors and getting the chance to practice the six traits of writing (Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions), I travel around the room and conference with the students about their writing. Then, with about five minutes left, I use our code phrase, "Let's wrap it up writers!" and the students clean up their materials and meet back up at the carpet to hear who has been chosen to sit in the Author's Chair and share their piece of writing. It's a super big deal! And, what they don't know is that Mrs. Wright has a clipboard keeping track of who and when each student has been chosen to sit in the Author's Chair just to make sure that everyone gets a chance to be affirmed in their writing skills. 

This past week we introduced the trait of Organization. We learned a song to help us remember that every good story/piece of writing must have a beginning, a middle, and a strong ending and we visualized the order using a train image, like this:

To help the students practice organization in their writing, they were asked to write about how they get ready for school each day and to specifically use the words first, next, then, and finally. They rocked it and even used some fabulous describing words/phrases like, "I zoomed to the bathroom..." They are amazing writer's and I'm pretty sure that a popular children's book will one day be written by one of our very own classroom authors! 

To finish up this post, I would like to share some pics of two of this past week's students chosen to sit in the Author's Chair!