Summer Writing Workshop

Writing Workshop this afternoon was a whirlwind of awesome. We read a few of my favorite mentor texts, talked about storytelling and writing generas, explored fun conventions such as the ellipsis (...) text size/location and color, and explored different illustration options.  One of the books we read aloud was "Beep, Beep, Go to Sleep!"  It's a book where a little boy is putting three robots down to sleep.  The number of kids that related to the robots getting up multiple times made me hope for a more restful evening for all you parents out there!  We also read my number one favorite, "Rhyming Dust Bunnies".  There were two different versions written in writing workshop camp today.  With cute fuzzy dust bunnies and speech bubbles the book is hard to resist, plus it encourages a lot of giggling. 

 Our focus for writing workshop is on fiction writing and telling stories.  We talked about he main elements in a piece of fiction (characters, setting, problem, solution) and dissected the mentor texts as we read them aloud.  We played a fun game from "Tell Me a Story" where we rolled story cubes and had to fill in the blanks for a few story starters. We played with funny pairings of characters and imagined all sorts of nonsense.  The giggles were quite intense at this point in our discussion which led quite easily into what kind of stories we like to listen to and read - stories that make us feel an emotion, like happiness!

 Students then got to work putting their ideas down on paper in their sloppy copy or rough draft.  We worked out the kinks together however due to time constraints we didn't do too much illustration work in our sloppy copies. After a short recess break we pulled out the hard-backed books for kiddos that were ready to start working on their own real book.  We talked about the cover and how the first page is usually a title page.  I encouraged kids to start their story on the second page in.  We read through their rough drafts and added correct spelling where needed to make reading easier.  They all did amazing work in our time together and I hope they finish their books at home.  I encouraged them to send me pictures or video of their completed books.  You can post them over on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/InitiateLearning. 

It was a fast paced adventure in storytelling where we explored ways to make vibrant, innovative, powerful, and intriguing stories.  We looked for examples of crazy pairings in mentor texts and tried to add our own crazy twists into our stories.