Writer's Workshop at Madrona K-8

Madrona is implementing Columbia University Teachers College Writer's Workshop in all classrooms from kindergarten through eighth grade. We're excited about the transformative effect that we know writing will have on each student and on the school culture as a whole.

We want to take this opportunity to tell you about what writing looks like in our classrooms. As you know, writing is one of the most important subjects in school, and it impacts all other subject areas. Its importance continues to grow as standardized tests, colleges, and employers demand writing samples as evidence of one's ability to communicate effectively. All students will grow in dramatic ways as writers this year.

When you visit our classrooms, you'll notice that we set aside time every day for writing. We refer to our writing time as writing workshop because that's a term published authors use. It makes sense to borrow their term because the children will follow a writing process used by published authors of novels, poems, short stories, essays, and articles.

In our classrooms, the writing workshop lasts for approximately an hour each day. It begins with a 10-minute writing lesson (which we call a minilesson) in which teachers explicitly teach the skills of good writing. Workshop starts with all writers gathering in a meeting space together for large group direct instruction. Writers are taught a strategy or method that they can use to make their writing stronger, clearer, and more correct. After the minilesson, the students work on their own writing for 40-45 minutes. As the students work, the teachers meet with small groups of writers who share the same instructional needs. Teachers also confer with individual writers. After the students work on their writing, they gather again for a teaching share time. This gives the teachers an opportunity for further instruction and gives our writers an opportunity show each other what they've accomplished.

You will notice enormous growth in your child's writing this year as we move from one unit to the next during writing workshop. Throughout this first month or so of school, your children will be writing personal narratives, which are true stories from their lives. This unit is meant not only to teach them qualities of good personal narrative writing, but it's also designed to help them develop stamina, focus, structure, detail, a sense of purpose, an appreciation for conventions, and an enthusiasm for writing.

As the year progresses, your child will learn to write in a variety of genre, including essay, literary essay, short fiction, poetry, and memoir. The year will be divided into month-long units. During each unit, your child will learn more about qualities of good writing and about writing processes. They'll also learn a variety of strategies to draw upon during each stage of the writing process.

We believe that writing well is a skill that can be taught and learned, and we are committed to teach children to write well-organized, detailed, compelling texts. Good writers must also know the conventions of good writing, which include punctuation, grammar, and strategies for accurate spelling. Much of the instruction on the conventions (or mechanics) will take place during our daily word study time, and your child's growing proficiency with the conventions of writing will transfer into their work during writing workshop. We encourage children to write first draft writing without belaboring each word, which means that this first draft writing will not be perfectly conventional. Over time, it will be very important that children develop better and better habits, so that it becomes second-nature for them to punctuate, paragraph and to spell high-frequency words correctly. Of course, children will edit and correct their drafts before publishing them.

You may wonder how you can help your child to prosper as a writer this year. The first thing we'd like to remind you of is that for most of us, writing can be frightening. Please encourage your child by helping your child realize that daily life brings with it stories that deserve to be told. When your family hears a noise behind the wall and you use a flashlight to find that the noise comes from a bird who has been living there, remind your child that this would make a great entry in his or her writer's notebook! When you get the chance to see your child's writing, please give your child what every writer needs above all: an interested, appreciative reader. Read the child's writing not as a judge, but as a reader, paying attention to the content. If you do this, you will make your child feel like an author, and you'll make it much more likely that your child will care about writing and will be ready to invest in the hard work required to grow as a writer.

We will have many celebrations of our writing throughout the year, and we will hang our published pieces of writing in the halls for all to read at the end of each unit.