Amazed

Today was one of those days where the class just amazes you.  I asked the class to do two things that were not exactly easy.  The class stepped up to the challenge and the results were amazing.

The first thing we asked the class was to complete an 11 minute essay.  An 11 minute essay is just like it sounds...the students write for 11 minutes.  We break up the time a bit, but the class writes for eleven minutes.  In the first two minute section we put this quote on the board, "If we really want to experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging."  The class wrote for two minutes about whether they agreed with the quote or what they thought the quote meant.  The next nine minutes was divided into three minute writing spurts where the students wrote about what it meant to belong or how it felt, then what it meant to not belong or how that would feel, and then finally they wrote for three minutes about where they belong and how they know that is where they belong.

It was amazing to see the amount of text that the students were able to produce.  Some students filled multiple pages with their thinking and the thinking they shared was just brilliant.  This 11 minute essay was a way to kick off our reading unit where we will think about what it means to belong.  I will talk more about this unit in the upcoming days on the blog but you can also get a glimpse of it in by looking for the Belonging packet in the red reading folder.  This kickoff could not have gone better and I cannot wait to see what the students show me next.

Then later in the day I asked the students to tell me what they noticed about two pieces of writing that we had created.  The pieces were claims about whether or not back to school was a good time of year or not a good time of year.  All year long I am going to ask students to tell me what they notice when they read a text.  This was the first time we had done it this year, and I was truly impressed with what the students noticed.  They found how we had organized our pieces.  They noticed how I liked to use lists in my piece.  They found all the different elements that we wanted them to find and with no help from us.

When writers are able to notice things from the texts they are reading, they can use the things that they notice when they write.  Authors do this all the time.  Hopefully as the year goes on the students will continue to notice things from texts and start to use what they notice to produce amazing texts.  The students will try this tomorrow when they write their first writing piece which will be a back to school claim.

Thanks for checking in on the blog and I hope you are having a great week.