My authentic question to my fellow bloggers is.....
What was the most helpful part of the assigned readings this week in terms of helping you prepare for your own lesson planning and what makes you say that?
For me I really enjoyed reading the sample 5-Day writing lesson plans in Writing Essentials because I found it to be most helpful for my planning. I chose writing as my core practice and conferencing as my target area to focus on for my own unit planning. I specifically paid close attention to the "Hero Writing" unit on page 323. This writing workshop format is very similar to how it is currently set up in my classroom, but in some ways it is different. Sometimes I feel like we are starting too many different pieces and not giving the students ample time to work and revise any of their writing because we are always moving on to the next mini-lesson with a new writing prompt. For me it was really refreshing to see a somewhat realistic and manageable way to have a mini unit with a single focus (heroes) and have the students be able to create a "published" piece in only 5 days. In my head writing conferences with a student had to be at least 10 minutes per student over the course of a longer period of time. My school only has writing four days a week for 60 minutes or so if we are lucky; so I was thinking I would only be able to meet with a few students a day. This book suggests if they have had enough time to edit and collaborate with others the average conference time per student is only 2 minutes on average because they have already done a lot of the work themselves! It seems so simple but this was really cool to hear! Reading this unit made me see how my unit could be different than what I was originally envisioning.
Was anyone else enlightened by what they read this week? :)
