inquiry 3 - Part A - Step 3

My writing focus fit in perfectly to our writer's workshop curriculum. I was lucky because I already had a curriculum to work from, that wasn't strict at all, but I had to find a way to break down the given lessons in a way that would work and flow well for my students. There were 20 lessons offered for the unit of 'Small Moment' writing and I had to decide what to use and what to take out of the unit to keep the lesson going on for a few months. 

Initially, filtering through the 20 lessons was very problematic for me. There was a LOT of information the curriculum wanted to cover and I had no idea how was going to pick what was more important than another lesson. I wanted my students to learn everything, I wanted to teach it all! But I knew that my kids would not be able to stay focused and motivated to learn the same style of writing for 20 + Writer's Workshop lessons. To overcome this problem, I looked at the big picture and became an expert on what 'Small Moment' writing really focused on. From there, I could look at the 20 lessons and decide which ones directly related to our genre and decide which lessons would work well with any genre and could be focused on at a later time. 

Then the lesson started. Even after filtering through all of the suggested writing lessons, I still had a lot of content I was expecting my students to learn and hopefully master in just a few weeks. I was expecting them to relate our 'Small Moment' genre to an event that happened in their lives, keep their writing focused on just one character, one setting and one event, practice good writing practices, revise their writing and perform it to the class. That was a whole lot of content to assess all of my 27 students on, especially while trying to further establish strong teacher- student relationships. 

What enabled me to be successful was the flexibility I had in this unit which allowed me to alter the amount and style of scaffolding I provided the students. After we got to the point of writing our three page booklets, the lessons shifted to mini lessons in the beginning of what was supposed to be covered in the lesson followed by a session where each part of our 'Small Moment' was focused on. One day, characters. Then next day, the setting of your story. The following lesson, the focus was on what was the one event that happened in your 'Small Moment'? I was able to take this challenging material and break it down in a way that worked best for my kids and helped them make the content their own. I was able to model the writing style in a first grade friendly way and it worked! This was a huge aha moment for me. 

My unit went better than expected. The final 3 page products were amazing and I was so proud of every student. We added a few extra work days to the unit and that really helped the students relax and focus on the details they needed for each part of their story to make it the best version possible. After having this aha moment, I really want to make sure I take the time in preparing all units, for all topics, to find out how the content needs to be broken down and scaffolded so the students have the biggest opportunity to succeed.