Beth, This One's For You!

So I participated in my first Writing Workshop experience in an elementary classroom! Until now, everything I've seen in a classroom has either been nothing like the writing workshop model. After reiterating to my teacher how much I really value writing workshop, she agreed and started planning it that way. After using the 4-square model and other prewriting tools for several days, my teacher let my students just write. They were so eager to actually take their prewriting and make it a solid piece of writing. There are several teachers during writing: my mentor teacher, myself, the EIP teacher, and three days a week the gifted teacher. So we were able to go around and have mini conferences with each student. I was so excited to read what they were writing. Oh, I think I was able to give some good suggestions, something I'm not always confident about. What's great is that we all collaborated and planned the mini/focus lessons for next week, rotating the lead teacher every day. We also got everyone on the same page and agreed that the students should have the majority of the time to write, and to write about what they WANT to write. I really pushed for no prompts, at least not yet. What's really cool is that we are each going to have student-teacher conference notebooks. Each of us will work with a few students all the way from prewriting to publishing, and we are going to use our notebooks to track our conferences and set goals with the students. Having so many teachers means that we can really hit every student and conference with them multiple times a week. I'm really excited about all of this, which probably sounds ridiculous and lame to non-teachers, but I don't care. I can't wait to start!