Our First Writers' Workshop!

The students did an excellent job on our very first Writers' Workshop!

 

The first Trimester's focus in on narrative writing. In class, we used our imagination and took an epic field trip to Mars, and experienced a variety of things on the planet. When we arrived back to school on our spaceship, we wrote about our experience together. 

We learned how to organize our writing using the 3 colors of the traffic light:

GREEN: The green topic sentence makes a statement on the BIG IDEA of the essay. There are NO details included in this sentence.

YELLOW: The yellow star ideas are the 3 main things that happened in the story.

RED: We write 2 red details under each star idea. This is where we can finally describe the events using descriptive words. 

GREEN: We use the green again for the conclusion since we re-state the topic sentence by using different words. 

For each yellow star idea, the students will choose TRANSITION WORDS that make the most sense for their story.

For the conclusion, the kids know to choose a "conclusion word" from this page. 

You can see the format on the right. They know that it's green, yellow-red-red, yellow-red-red, yellow-red-red, and green again.

This is the outline that we put together. On the outline, they do not need to write in complete sentences (except for the topic sentence and conclusion).  

Using the outline as our guide, we wrote the rough draft using COMPLETE SENTENCES. (Note: The outline and the rough draft are from different students, so they will not match.)

Then, we used our CUPS to do our self-editing. We went through each item, one at a time using our red pens. 

(For spelling, they asked how to spell words as they worked on their final copy, and I wrote them on the board.)

Finally, the final copy was written on lined paper. They used their edited rough draft to copy down each sentence. 

Most common errors:

• Thinking that they have to start on a new line for every sentence.
• Forgetting to indent.
• Not skipping lines.
• Run-on sentences (We are learning how to form compound sentences using a comma-and, comma-or, comma-but, etc.)
• Trying to cram too much into one sentence.
• Not copying the correct spelling from the board.
• Forgetting the period at the end of each sentence.

I am so very proud of their hard work. We will continue to work on our writing skills throughout the year!