Invitation By: Shel Silverstein

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InvitationBy Shel Silverstein

• If you are a dreamer, come in
• If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
• A hope-er, a prayer, a magic bean buyer . . .
• If youre a pretender, come sit by my fire
• For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
• Come In!
• Come In!

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Writing Workshop Overview

• The Essential Parts
• Packet S2

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The Structure

• 4 5 Times/Week
• 45 60 minutes
• Focus Lesson
• 5-15 minutes
• Work Time
• 30 45 minutes
• Sharing Time
• 5 15 minutes

Sharing Time
Focus Lesson
Work Time
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Focus Lesson (Direct Instruction)

• Short instruction on one aspect of writing
• Process
• Craft
• Conventions
• Explicit Instruction
• Usually in a meeting area
• Establishes a writer to writer relationship

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Work Time

• Quiet Writing Time
• Everyone is writing
• Students could be trying out the lesson
• Music

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Work Time

• Teacher is conferring
• Students are acting as writers

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Share Time

• Develops a Community of Writers
• Provides an Audience
• Develops Communication Skills
• Different Kinds

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Observation Experience

• The writing process approach requires a radically
  different pace than we are used to in our
  schools.
• Lucy Calkins (The Art of Teaching Writing)

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Packet R2The writing process approach requires
a radically different pace than we are used to in
our schools. But time is our scarcest resource.
Teachers often ask me, How do I squeeze writing
in on top of everything else? My suggestion is
simple Dont. Instead of shoehorning one more
thing into the crowded curriculum, I suggest that
we each take a good, hard look at our school day
to determine what is not longer needed there. My
husband I recently moved from one Connecticut
town to another, and the thing that surprised me
most about the move was the amount of junk we had
accumulated. We took fifteen carloads of trash
to the dump. Sometimes I think that if we, as
teachers, want to move on, we need to take
carloads of curricula to the dump. It is only by
cleaning out some old things that we can give
time and space to new ones.Lucy Calkins