Ready... Set... Go!

"Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect."

 -Alan Cohen

After weeks of assessing and planning and thinking and rethinking, I started off this week jumping straight into my Action Research Inquiry which revolves around the question,

“How does writing for an audience affect students’ achievement in and attitude toward writing?”

I was excited, nervous, scared, and hopeful to start a daily writing program in my second grade classroom and knew that it was going to be a huge change for the students. Being able to write everyday takes practice and I understand that my students will need to build up their endurance for writing. To get them fired up about writing everyday, I introduced the students to their special writing tools, their first writing topic, their first major deadline and their first audience.

Before spring break, the students read several stories by Tommie dePaola and discussed the different elements of a story such as its characters, the setting, the problem and the solution. I told the children that they would be telling a story from their own personal lives and that they would pick the experience they would write about. I explained that they would have three weeks to brainstorm, draft, edit and publish their stories so that they could share them during an author's celebration. During this celebration, other students from the school, parents, administrators and community members would be invited to read their stories AND we would be publishing their stories in a hard cover book so that people could BUY it. The students were stoked. They were all about having their stories in a REAL book that people had to actually pay money for.

I would like to say that after my mini lessons about prewriting, characters, setting, problems and solutions, the students grabbed their pens and pencils and wrote with fervor and enthusiasm. The truth is, while almost all of the kids expressed excitement and motivation during the lessons, their excitement faded as soon as they were sitting in their seats, pencil in hand and paper on desk. Familiar looks of frustration appeared on their faces and the statement, "I don't know what to write," was repeated more than I wanted to hear.

The Good News: After repeating certain questions (Where were you? What did it look like? When did this happen? Who was with you? How did you feel?) students began to warm up and their creative juices began to flow. (For some, their creative juices trickled, but I'll take it). I noticed that encouraging students to talk before they wrote, either to me or to each other, helped in getting them to write their ideas on paper. The trick was asking the right questions and I am hoping I can teach my students to ask each other the 'right' questions so that I do not have to conference with everybody everyday.

If anyone has any advice regarding effective and efficient ways to implement peer feedback, your ideas would be greatly appreciated!