It’s month #2!  I know lots of teacher bloggers are finishing up the school year…so this month may be a little quieter–who knows?!?

So my “Loved That Lesson” for June was a great day of reflecting on our accomplishments in writing this year!  We started off by brainstorming a list of everything we knew about good awesome writing. The students did a nice job on their list…it’s all their ideas, so there are a few things I wish had gotten added–but overall it’s a pretty decent list.  As they brainstormed, I tried to consolidate, organize,  and add on where it made sense.

After that, I passed back a TON of their writing from this year and pulled out our writing and reader’s notebooks.  We had a little chat about how writing in reading, science, math, and social studies is still writing–and we should see these qualities of good writing in those subjects too!  Students hadn’t really thought about it like that…and apparently I hadn’t conveyed that well (feels like I said it a million times?). Next year I’ll do better…I can tell it’s worth it!

The students had a BLAST looking over their writing, referring to their giant checklist, and talking about what they would do differently if they could rewrite the pieces now with all their “wisdom and skills”.  After they spent some time sharing their pieces and looking through their notebooks, I asked them to do a little reflecting on what they feel they are doing well as a writer, and where they still may need to set goals.

All in all, we spent about a half hour just enjoying all the great writing they had done this year…and I think next year I’m going to try to do this each quarter so they can do some better goal setting for the following quarter.  It was a super nice way to spend one of our last writing classes!