Living Life Twice

This is a journey that begins with selecting and sharing powerful texts and simply letting kids enjoy them. It is a journey of discovery. It involves sharing texts with learners. Texts we know and trust. Texts written in such compelling ways that they can assist us to more effectively teach the craft of writing. They become mentoring texts.  Think of mentor texts as a term that essentially means – models, exemplars or examples . ‘Mentor texts’ is not something we do within a writing program for its own sake. It is not an entity in itself. It is an integral part of learning how to become a better writer. It requires the ability to read like a writer in order to be able to see the potential in a text to provide a model worth following or adopting. Our starting point as teacher/writers is to share the joy of reading great words and the possibilities they might potentially spark in the mind of the reader. Reading a text initially for enjoyment, before you move to examining craft, incr...

Teaching the craft of writing requires teachers to be explicit in their work with students. Explicit and mindful teaching occurs when teachers are clear about what it is they want children to learn and when  a meaningful, focused program of instruction is provided.  This means conference notes and conversations, as well as writing samples are integral to the process of knowing what to teach.  The instruction provided by the teacher benefits from being informed by such insight.  Learning to look below the surface features and errors in the writing piece creates an opportunity to see the potential hidden beneath. Possibilities beyond grammar, punctuation and sentence structure emerge. When consideration is given to focused learning, student writers receive opportunities to make sense of the learning by creating purposeful connections between lesson purposes, tasks, texts, and lesson reflections. If these aspects of our lesson align, we increase our ...