Our book club is reading "The Art of Teaching Writing."Crystal, Krista and I read section one "The Essentials of Writing."  This section is about getting Writer's Workshop started and to communicate to your students the excitement you have for writing. On the first pages she said that writing is not desk work, it is life work!  We all three loved how she was so enthusiastic about her writer's notebook. She did an amazing job communicating just how special that notebook is to her.  On the first days of school she told them "you have so much to say," "you are authors."  This really gives the students ownership of their writing.  Isoke used writer's workshop as a time to demonstrate the role writing plays in her life and to invite students to join her in living the writerly life.  We like how she establishing norms in the classroom, rather than just writing expectations on the board. This is definitely an area in which I have failed.  We liked how she compared how the writing process to a seed.

Krista and I will be focusing on teaching Writer's Workshop this year.  I still have many questions on how I will incorporate this in my classroom.  We will be teaching K-2 of a 120 students each.  I feel that it will be a challenge, but I am looking forward to it.  In the chapter about revision, I have never looked at it in the same way that she does.  I have been guilty of referring to revision as fixing the mistakes, but she points out that revision is looking at a piece of writing and getting new ideas from it.