to write or not to write....

In my first 3 months being a reading teacher I have realized that I in fact really, really love to teach writing. I understand writing, I retain the information about the people who are writing gurus and I think I'm pretty good at getting the students to do it. This six weeks I decided to teach writing. It is on the test, the kids need it and the other teachers (that are teaching English) are not doing it. Well I say that, they aren't doing it as much as I would, but they are writing some.

Today I created this awesome lesson where the students choose a generic topic (first day of school, championship game, etc) and then they choose 3 styles of how to write an introduction (description, dialogue, interior monologue, action, etc.) It is cool cause they rewrite the same thing 3 different ways. They can see how they can rewrite things to match the story better, how you can say the same thing 3 ways and practice with different methods of writing. I found that last year students would only try one way of writing an introduction. They ALL used begin with a question. Thus, they never branched out and never really refined that method either. I'm trying it different this year.

So far I have at least two kids that *never* do anything that are interested and asking how to do it. One literally didn't write anything last year. The other wrote some stuff for me, but didn't put much effort and *never* asked questions about how to do it. Both kept trying to get me to help them and wrote stuff!!! Yes, that seems like a small thing, but really it is a very big thing. I'm super proud of them. small victories.

update on the kids who hang out in my room. Today I had 3 who used computers, 3 who finished their intro paragraphs before I let them on (one i made stay after because he goofed off all 7th period). One kid told me that he wished he could know what I was like outside of school (not being a teacher) this i laughed at and told him that was a much more interesting teacher than I was a person. I explained that my husband and I read books for fun...and that we went to the movies for the first time in a *long* time on Friday and it almost got vetoed cause there wasn't anything Dan wanted to see. But I conned him into Zorro (Antonio Bandaras :). I think I convinced them that I wasn't that interesting a person.