October 26 - the 1st quarter ends in 5 days!

Why was the last time I blogged about the week of Oct 6? Because I attended the very valuable, maybe priceless is a better word, Reunion Saturday hosted by TCRWP last weekend. So I blogged about that on my other blog - www.funwithreadingandwriting.blogspot.com.

Looking back to my last post I wrote:
Now I need to get busy. I need to:
* reading the 80 printed out fiction stories and quickly giving feedback.
Done and now I spent 8 hours yesterday reading the published piece of all 80 students and scoring it on a rubric to return to them this week. 
* plan out this coming week's lessons
I did this, incorporating revision, editing, a great museum walk publishing party, a day to reflect, and then a final narrative on-demand. SUCH a great way to complete our unit of study on fiction!!!
* plan out the new unit of study - Argument Essay - starting Oct. 23rd
Still working on this but last week at TC's Reunion Saturday allowed me to attend 4 hour long workshops all related to teaching argument essay!! Perfect timing!!
* start thinking about report cards
Today I will start to write comments for each student specific to their writing work during their first Advisory (what DCPS calls the first quarter). It is the practice at my school that a written, specific comment is provided along with the report card grades so I plan to get busy on this task today as it needs to be shared with my fellow teammates by Halloween which is Friday because Parent-Teacher Conferences begin the Monday after Halloween.
When I see a list like this, I know there is NOT enough hours in the day to do it all.
But I'll start and do the best I can.

When I see a list like this, I know there is NOT enough hours in the day to do it all.
But I'll start and do the best I can....I repeat because it is SO true...

One idea that Lucy and Carl Anderson point out about teaching writing is that we teach using a workshop model where the goal is to teach the writer and not the writing. As I used the rubric and today plan to use the grade level Narrative Checklists given in Pathways to score both the 2nd day of writing on-demand and this past Friday's On-Demand, I see that this tool is perfect to show how the WRITER grows. 

My only wish...it didn't take so much time to read and check 80 students. This is why I am up and at it already on a Sunday. I guess I'll catch up on sleep on Veteran's Day!