For the first week of school we talked about the Writing Workshop as something that was very special, something that we would get to do when the class was really ready.  This helped to build the excitement.  The kids would ask whether we were ready to start it yet and we would pretend to think about it and decide that maybe we should start another day- until the kids finally begged us to let them try it.  The build-up was important, because it helped the kids to see writing as a privilege, not a punishment.

 

When the class finally began the workshop on the second week of school, we started with minilessons on how to choose a really important word and figure out how to write it all by ourselves.  We wanted the kids to value writing independently and realize from the very beginning that they could not rely on the teachers to help them write every word.  We modeled writing words that the kids chose by stretching them out slowly and writing the letters we heard.  As a teacher, I made sure to model "Kid Writing"- not perfect adult writing- and to point out that different kids would probably write the same word in different ways.  This was to show them that we were not looking for a perfect word, but for an attempt and would value what they wrote.

 

We spent several weeks challenging the kids to draw a picture of something important to them and then to write the word all by themselves.  Some kids picked this up right away and began to choose more than one word to write, but others focused on just one word for a longer time.  The paper we gave them was half of a sheet of paper that had a box at the top for a drawing and 2 or 3 lines at the bottom for words; as the kids began to write more independently we gave them the whole sheet of paper folded in half like a book and had them fill the whole book full of words and pictures.  Meanwhile, we celebrated the students who tried new words instead of writing the same ones every day, we made a big deal out of every student who wrote all by themselves and tried to build their confidence as writers.

 

After students were able to write one or two words without much guidance, we began to model putting words together into a sentence.  The minilesson on one day would have us drawing a dog and labeling it "Dog".  The next day we went back to the same drawing and wrote "I love my dog" or "My dog is big."  When we were ready to start writing we would count the words as we spoke them and then write them one by one, counting again at the end to see if we had written as many words as we had spoken.  The kids who were ready to begin writing sentences began to do this on their own, and we continued working with the kids who were writing one or two words to try to nudge them along and support them enough to write a sentence.  We met with each child in a writing conference at least once a week, usually twice a week.  During our conference we celebrated what the child did independently and then helped them go a little big further with some guidance.

 

By October, most students were comfortable writing without much help and we began to focus the minilessons on other aspects of writing.  We talked about how to leave spaces between our words and how that helps.  We began to add on details to our writing and adding sentences to give more information.  And we READ- every book that we read in class we tried to connect to our writing and talk about why the author chose to do what they did and whether we could try the same thing in our writing. 

 

It was hard work to help the kids become confident enough to feel like authors, but I hope that a look through their writing has shown that the results are worth the effort.  My students look forward to writing workshop and the chance to express their ideas creatively.  They are beginning to read like writers and come up with ideas for their own writing from the writing of others.  I am so proud of their progress!