Writer's Celebration!

This past Monday we had our Writer's Celebration. This was an idea that my fellow team member, Lara, brought to us from Grade 2. She did it last year and it was such a success that we wanted to do it in Grade 3. We were all for it!

About two weeks before the big day, students looked in their writing journals and chose a piece that they wanted to revise, edit and publish. We discussed how it had to be a piece that they really liked because they were going to be working on it for two straight weeks. Once the piece was chosen, they copied it, double spaced, onto a sheet of paper so that it would be easy to make changes to. Then I assigned writing partners and together, we worked through may mini-lessons on various steps of the revising, editing and publishing process. Lara provided us with a list of lessons from a Lucy Calkins resource she had and I added a few mini-lessons of my own from our Write Source materials.

These mini-lessons included:

• revising the ending
• writing an interesting lead
• rereading to make sure your story makes sense
• including dialogue in your story
• adding similes
• adding interesting words
• omitting extraneous details
• adding transition words
• using the 5 senses to make the story come alive
• editing for capitals, organization, punctuation and spelling (we like to call it "Call the C.O.P.S.")
• publishing in a polished format
• adding a full page illustration

It was a wonderful morning and it was so nice to see so many family members listening and learning about the writing process from their child. We even had the vice-principal and the librarian in to visit and see all of the progress. The kids did such a great job!