After you’ve devised a plan to launch your writer’s workshop during the first weeks of school, the next step is to look ahead toward the rest of the year. This one-day workshop is designed to guide K-8 teachers through the planning of a year-long writing curriculum, incorporating mini-lessons, literature, and assessment within a variety of writing units. Kristina will provide lesson plan examples for several writing units, then she’ll reveal her framework for developing any writing unit on your own.
Training topics
Activities to utilize whenever you introduce a new writing genre to students
Ways to incorporate student anchor papers and kid-friendly rubrics within a unit
Procedures for selecting which writing standards to target within a writing unit
Strategies for teaching a writing skill over multiple days to deepen student understanding and gradually release responsibility to the students
Ways to integrate grammar study throughout the year
Strategies to balance free choice writing and prompted writing assignments
Strategies to balance first drafts along with final-draft pieces
Suggestions for grading student writing and assessing students’ understanding of a genre
When you leave, you will be able to:
Organize your grade level writing standards and grammar skills within writing units throughout the year
Plan mini-lessons and corresponding independent activities to develop students’ writing skills
Take one mini-lesson and develop it into a multi-day series that gradually releases the responsibility to the students
Plan your writing units to give students experience writing both free-choice final drafts and no-choice first drafts (prompts)
Speed up or slow down any writing unit to meet the needs of your writers
Target isolated skills within intermittent “maintenance mini-lessons” throughout the year
Call Smekens Education toll free to learn more. 888-376-0448
Participants in this workshop are eligible to earn one hour of graduate credit from Purdue University-Calumet.
