'We do' so that 'you do'

Today we had Writers' Workshop. We learned about places that were in the book Ben's Dream. We wrote about the place that we want to go to. - Gal

We had Math in the tech lab. We did Number of the Day on computers. Our number was 85. - Braylin

We continued on with our Chris Van Allsburg author study today, as we read Ben's Dream. We read the book, in which Ben, while studying for a geography test, falls asleep and dreams that he visits many famous landmarks around the world (i.e. the Parthenon, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Great Sphinx, the Great Wall of China, etc.). Of course, these are the same landmarks he'd been studying up on. The students broke off into small groups, with each group assigned one of the landmarks from the story. When they were finished, each group presented their landmark to the class, telling the other students where it was located, and why it was famous. As usual, the students then had to write a response - today's question was for them to pick which of the landmarks they'd like to visit, and why. However, the past few times we'd done this, I'd been noticing that a good chunk of the class was having problems crafting their responses. So, we focused today on how to write a paragraph to answer a question. We used a graphic organizer on the SMARTBoard to break the paragraph into 5 chunks: an introductory sentence, in which they make their choice, 3 reasons to support their choice, and a summary sentence at the end that basically tells the reader what they've just told them. I modelled for the class how to do this (with their help, on suggestions for reasons to visit Big Ben), and then they attempted to do this on their own, with a copy of the same graphic organizer. The students who were having some difficulty with writing responses previously found it a lot easier to do so with the organizer - even though it took some of them a while, everybody finished! This is something I'm going to keep working on with them, so it get easier and easier for them to write a paragraph- as Ms. Cross (our principal) reminded me, Regie Routman (an expert on teaching writing in Early Years schools) preaches 'we do, we do, we do, we do, we do, you do' when it comes to modelling good writing habits for children, where 'we' refers to the class, and 'you' refers to the individual student. The more we model, the easier it becomes for them. Today was a good reminder for me that, while they are picking up on the idea, I need to continue (and continue!) to model it for them - 'one and done' is almost never enough!