Writers' Workshop

Teaching the writing process takes much time and patience. However, the students persevered and did an excellent job!

First of all, take a look at our awesome Award-Winning Writers' Notebooks that we will get to keep adding on to throughout the year. 

There is a method to my madness here. We are learning to write an EXCELLENT paragraph using our Green, Yellow, Red, and Green. Please look carefully at each color's explanation below.

 

We will always use an outline that looks like this:

This is an INFORMATIONAL essay, so our green Topic Sentence gives a big idea or a big fact about our topic (no opinions, and no details should be in the Topic Sentence). 

The yellow Star Ideas give FACTS about our topic. The yellow Star Ideas always begin with TRANSITION words. 

We LOVE our "cheat sheets" that are included in our Writers' Notebook. This is a list of our time-order words/temporal words that we can use as our transitions. 

Next, we give 2-3 Red Examples about each of our yellow Star Ideas. 

Then, we move on to our rough draft paper that looks like this. This is when we use our outline and make everything into COMPLETE SENTENCES:

We do self-editing as well as peer-editing, and go crazy with our red pens:) 

We even have a cheat sheet for our green conclusion sentences. This is green because we go back to our green Topic Sentence, and restate the topic sentence in different words. 

Finally, we carefully use all of the corrections from our editing process, and we write our FINAL COPY. They must indent, skip lines, and only use the front of the loose leaf paper. 

The final copy will be graded using the following rubric (or something similar):

Informational Text Rubric (Step Up to Writing)

Name___________________Date___________Score___________

______(3/3) I wrote my name, number, and date.

­­­­­­­______(3/3) I remembered to indent the paragraph.

______(5/5) I skipped lines.

______(10/10) My topic sentence gives a big, overall idea of the topic. It does not give

                         away the details of the topic.

______(6/6) I have 3 Star Ideas.

______(6/6) The Star Ideas begin with transition words.

______(6/6) The Star Ideas give facts about the topic sentence.

______(6/6) I have 2-3 Red Examples for each Star Idea.

______(5/5) My Red Examples give specific examples for each Star Idea.

______(5/5) My conclusion begins with “Conclusion Sentence Words.”

______(5/5) My conclusion restates the topic sentence in other words.

______(10/10) I used my editing marks to write the final draft correctly.

______(10/10) I used punctuation marks correctly.

______(10/10) I spelled 3^rd grade words correctly, or copied the provided spelling

                          of words.

______(10/10) I used correct grammar.