How we do our Writing sessions

In Room 24 we have our writing sessions on Thursday mornings.  After I introduce the genre of writing, we do a Round Robin (Kagan Strategy).  The students have a small whiteboard in each group.  They have to write down all the criteria they can think of for that genre.  For example, if we are writing a narrative, some of the criteria are that it needs an orientation, complication, resolution, onomatopoeia, characters, setting, WOW words etc.  These are then written on the large whiteboard and students copy them into their books.  

Then I give students a writing stimulus.  The one above was about waking up and finding that your pet can talk.  Our focus for this piece was using speech marks and we discussed how and when to use these.  We also discussed this topic and brainstormed some ideas to write about.  Then students have about 30 minutes to write their story.  While writing, I play Mozart music - this is supposed to stimulate their brains and keep them focused during writing.  

When the writing session is over student then have some time to edit their work.  This week I introduced a writing goal sheet for students to check off where they think they are.  After writing this week, we discussed the music and talked about how people used to dance to this.  Students were eager to learn this sort of dancing so with the help of Youtube we tried some Regency dancing.  It was a lot of fun and they enjoyed having a go!