Yesterday I introduced peer conferencing. I taught students the procedure, and they had a chance to begin meeting with a peer to conference about their writing. Today we generated an anchor chart to add to our Writer's Workshop wall to record what we know about peer conferencing.
We also looked at our blog to analyze some of the pictures I took of peer conferencing groups together. In the picture below, we noticed how both Cody and April were both looking at April's writing. They are sitting near each other, and Cody is doing a respectful job listening to April. He's not playing with his notebook or his marker. We noticed lots of great things we did yesterday from our pictures. Way to go, fourth graders!
Students finished up their peer conferences today. Any time they're done with their peer conference, students rip their drafts out of their notebooks, staple their peer conferencing sheet to their draft, put their draft inside their Quick Word book, and then put it all in our green folder, which indicates the student is ready for an adult to look at his or her writing.
At Open House, I asked for parent volunteers to help during Writer's Workshop. Parents are a huge help in this step of Writer's Workshop. Fortunately, I have a parent coming in every single day of the week to help look at student writing so that we can move students on to the publishing stage of the writing process. As adults, we put words in students' Quick Word books that they circled in their writing so students have a resource to find their words. We also fix any other major things they missed in terms of capitalization and punctuation. Our adult fixes get done using green marker so they stand our to students when they publish. I, personally, look at all students' writing before it gets handed back to them so that I can record common errors that will eventually make for new writing goals for students.
Our writing process anchor charts help students keep track of what they are to be doing during each stage of the writing process. All they need to do is look up at the charts to be reminded of what the step is and what it should look like. This all enables students to be as independent as possible during writing time. Because we co-constructed these anchor charts, the kids are better able to understand them rather than just being charts I hung at the beginning of the year.
At the end of our day today we had a visitor! Blake was Person of the Week because his birthday was on Monday. Today his mom brought in their 90 lb. puppy, Max!
Homework:
1. Reading: 15 mins., Pizza Log
2. Math: Facts - 10 mins.
3. Spelling: Sentences, Test tomorrow
4. Thursday envelope
Book orders are due next Thursday!
EARLY RELEASE TOMORROW @ 11:50!
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