Writing Invitations

This week’s work was focused on two themes that I feel guided my learning to becoming a more effective teacher of writing. These themes included developing as a writer through writing invitations and teaching students how to write effective sentences through sentence combining instruction.
Living “The Writing Life” In completing this week’s writing invitations, I really challenged myself to try out different genres of writing in response to the prompt. I started off the first writing invitation as more of a reflective journal of sorts. I just wrote about previous memories of summer. However, as Donald Graves has discussed the writer’s notebook as not a diary. So, keeping this in in mind and reading more about the writing workshop in Ray’s The Writing Workshop textbook has really me realize that in order for my students …show more content…
We were also challenged to look beyond surface errors and look at student mistakes as invitations to grow. I think this is an important reminder for all teachers. I feel like as literacy teachers, we know that a sentence can have proper grammar, but not be a strong sentence. Thus, learning how to write a strong sentence is a foundational skill for proficient writers. I am planning on using the sentence combining exercises with my students next year because many of my students struggle with writing a strong sentence. I want to focus on my instruction using the growth mindset approach, and allowing mistakes through learning. Right now, I know that I am too focused on surface errors because my students forget to add punctuation and capitalization! I want to find a better balance between teaching grammar and strong sentence writing. I also like how in the Best Practices text discussed a teacher who used student’s rough drafts and had students peer edit each other’s work discussing their strengths and weaknesses. I think this mindset is crucial for writers in order to