Craft & Draft

Welcome everyone to the Craft & Draft podcast! We are so excited to bring to you what we love, talking with you about workshop, literacy, writing, reading, and real world teaching. 

This year has moved at a rapid pace.  School rounds the last few curves in the road before it reaches the last stretch of the school year, Jacob and Pam share how their workshops are doing during this part of the year.  Pam shares how quarantine has slowed the flow of her workshop while Jacob shares how he has experienced a few struggles of his own due to pandemic stress. 

They both recognize that when times are normal, a Reading and Writing Workshop moves through a natural waxing and waning. The question they both work through during this episode is: What do you do when productivity seems to wane?

Fight the panic… embrace the messiness…and trust your students.  

Join Jacob and Pam as they share some of their solutions for a waning workshop.  Get a boost to keep moving down the road to workshop success!

The post #24 The Waxing and Waning of Workshop appeared first on Craft & Draft.

Welcome everyone to the Craft & Draft podcast! We are so excited to bring to you what we love, talking with you about workshop, literacy, writing, reading, and real world teaching. 

We stand on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before us!  Laura Robb is one of those giants in education.  She has taught Reading and Writing for over 40 years to students and teachers.  She has written more than 30 books about our craft. Pam leaned heavily on Laura’s book Teaching Reading in Middle School (2000) when she began teaching reading in middle school. 

In this episode, Jacob and Pam speak to Laura Robb about how our students are not writing. She discusses how teachers must create writing workshops that encourage students to write meaningful pieces.  She shares how teachers must write and allow choice, as well as the freedom for students to work through the genuine writing process.  

Join Jacob and Pam as they participate in a conversation with Laura Robb. Let’s learn together how we can help our children enter the writing life!  

You DO NOT want to miss this one!

The post #23 Laura Robb: Entering the Writing Life appeared first on Craft & Draft.

Welcome everyone to the Craft & Draft podcast! We are so excited to bring to you what we love, talking with you about workshop, literacy, writing, reading, and real world teaching. 

In this episode, Jacob and Pam discuss what we are seeing as our students are experiencing the challenges of school during this most uncertain time.  The students need to read and write daily. The teacher must provide opportunities for the students to choose their topics to write about as well as the books they want to read.  Yet, Covid and the constant in and out of students has put a strain on access to great texts. 

Jacob then brings up a choice he needs to make regarding his upcoming unit in reading.  Should his class read a whole group novel or should he include more book choices using literature circles.  Pam helps him work through the pros and cons of either direction.  She shares some past experiences with both modes of instruction.

Jacob shares his unique approach that no matter his choice his students will benefit and he will stay true to Reading and Writing Workshop…or at least he hopes!!! 

Join Jacob and Pam while they go back and forth as they consider what is best for their students.  Maybe it will help you decide too!

The post #22 Whole Group Novel or Literature Circles? appeared first on Craft & Draft.

Welcome to the Craft & Draft podcast with Jacob Chastain and Pam Ochoa!  We love talking about our craft!  We believe that the Reading and Writing Workshop grows our students as thinkers, readers, and writers. We face the daily challenges of the classroom and our discussions help us, so we want to share them with other teachers.

In this episode, we share how the Craft & Draft system helps us assess our students and our own teaching. All teachers want their students to show growth, but how can the teacher be confident that their lessons create growth for student readers and writers? The Craft & Draft Books creates a systematic approach to monitoring and assessing for student growth.

Our system helps the teacher trace the standard to the mini lesson to the student work to the student application to the assessment.  We begin with our approach to assessing students; we conclude with how we use the Craft and Draft Notebooks to understand the needs of our students.

Join us as we share how the Craft & Draft system effectively weaves the reading, writing, and assessment together in a data driven world. 

The post #21 Publishing, Assessing, and Measuring Growth appeared first on Craft & Draft.

Welcome back to Craft and Draft podcast with Jacob Chastain and Pam Ochoa. Last week they shared how they used the CRAFTBOOK. As promised, this week they sit down and discuss  the details of the DRAFTBOOK. The DRAFTBOOK empowers our students to become writers.  We share how the students utilize it during their writing process.

In this episode, Jacob shares how his students enjoy writing and uses their DRAFTBOOKS to hone their writing skills.  Pam discusses how her students develop an ownership of their DRAFTBOOKS and how they create authentic pieces of writing. Both express how this system makes the teaching of writing enjoyable for both the students and the teachers.

As we mentioned last week, the podcast can only translate only so much of the system.  We hope that dedicating an episode to each aspect of the system will help our listeners implement the journals and help you enhance your Reading and Writing Workshop.

As a note: we do apologize for the slight “hiss” from our audio. As with all things teaching, things went wrong and we went with the flow! Hopefully it does not impede too much on your listening. 

The post #20 The Draftbook appeared first on Craft & Draft.