Welcome to our fourth grade classroom! Every year, on the first day of school, I have my students choose a class name. This year, they came up with ideas, voted, and chose our name to be the Wolves. The Wolf Pack is a group of creative, inquisitive and active learners, who love to share ideas and work together!
Our school is a wonderfully diverse community.
In our classroom alone, we have students whose families come from over half a dozen different countries, and students who speak many different languages. Our students come from a variety of different economic backgrounds, and close to half of our students receive free or reduced lunch.
My Project
Writing workshop is many students' favorite part of the school day. It's a time when students can be creative and inspired. They learn not only how to grow as writers, but how to share and listen, how to provide meaningful feedback, how to problem-solve, and how to set goals for themselves. The materials I've selected for this project will enable students to engage in writing workshop to the best of their ability.
Think about a time writing felt good for you.
What made it feel good? I know for me, I enjoy writing most when I have some choice in what I write about and can use materials that work best for me, and I try to bring this consideration to my teaching. For example, one of materials in this project is a set of beautiful black flair pens. Many teachers rarely allow students to use pens, but I believe they are vastly superior to pencils. Pencils can be difficult to write with - they're never sharp enough, they break, and they can enable reluctant writers to waste a lot of time erasing. Pens are just easier to write with! You barely have to apply any pressure to the page to make a mark. I think students will be excited to use "grown up" pens to do their writing.
The binders will be used to collect samples from mentor texts and published student work, the baskets are for storing the pens in a quickly accessible location, and the Post-Its will be used for minilessons and goal-setting (it's extremely helpful for students to be able to have their writing goal for the day right in front of them and not have to flip back and forth in their writing notebook).
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