When I first started teaching the focus was on getting students to read and get better at math. For me, that was what my focus was on.

I didn’t really have a ‘writing program’ or really any structure to get my students writing and writing consistently.

Then there was this defining moment when I had my class list for the next year and I was talking with my teaching partner whose students I would be getting for the next year. We looked at my class list, saw that it was 2/3 boys and she began to tell me how much the boys from her room ‘hated’ writing and refused to do it.

This is a thread that I hear over and over….’my students hate writing’….’how to I get them to care about what they write’.

Fast forward to today in my room writing is the favourite time for the majority of my students. In fact, one group made me switch my workshop rotations because they had one day in the cycle where they didn’t have writing and this just didn’t sit well with them.

Now writing looks like

- highly engaged students who beg to write

- early finishers immediately start working on writing

- we think of ourselves as writers

- we love writing and seeing our growth as writers

So how did I get there????