Writing Program Reflection

The writing program used by the teacher comes from Lucy Caulkins. After lunch every day, the class begins their one hour writing block. The block generally begins with a mini-lesson that takes up about 10-15 minutes. These lessons usually involve the teacher modeling for the students different skills and techniques that they will practice in their writer’s notebooks. For the first portion of the year, the class has been mainly working on three different writing skills: how to pick topics to write about, creating small moment stories, and how to develop believable characters. Choosing a topic for a story is one of the toughest aspects of writing. Because of this, we have spent time during writing lessons to focus on methods students can use …show more content…
In essence, these stories zoom in on exact details. Instead of a student writing about their weeklong vacation to Disney, they write about one moment that occurred on that vacation. This writing technique comes from the Lucy Calkins writing program. To introduce students to this topic, we read a book called Peter’s Chair by Ezra Jack Keats. The book is very short, and tells the story of a boy whose life is changed when his little sister is born. His sister now sleeps in his old crib, uses his old baby toys, and even sits in his old high chair. The boy attempts to steal the chair, and run off with it before his dad can paint it pink. Eventually Peter comes to terms with the change and agrees to help his dad paint his old chair. The story is concise and to the point. It is able to get across an important theme, change is hard, through a short small moment in Peter’s life, when he tried to run off with his chair. Other than reading this book, we have modeled for the student picking out little moments in our lives, and pulling out the key details in the story. Ultimately, the children will take these small moments to form a personal narrative. The final focus of the writing lessons has been on character