From TV shows to your favorite clothes, these baby boomer memories will take you back in time.

Photo taken during the filming of the infamous grape stomping episode of "I Love Lucy"

Ethereal gown for a ghost or a vampire bride, featuring real human hair!

I've had a number of people find my organization of the Writer's Notebook to be very helpful; hooray! However, many need more information on how to actually implement the Writer's Workshop (also called Writers' Workshop & Writing Workshop). When I found this visual today (and repinned it on Pinterest- Stephanie Madison) I knew I had to get it up here. It didn't have the creator, but the original graphic can be found at: http://media-cache-ec3.pinterest.com/upload/173670129351766770_LI9UQzFs.jpg It's a perfect visual for the basic breakdown of Writer's Workshop: That pretty much sums it up! You start with a mini-lesson about whatever you are working on in writing. This can be guided by the standards that you're working through and the curriculum you have. We don't really have a writing curriculum in our district, so I mostly make stuff up based on the standards and what I see the kids need. See my post on dictation ( http://applesofyoureye.blogspot.com/2012/09/dictation-dictado.html ) for more on how to focus in on what your kids need practice with on writing. You can use this 5-15 minutes for any mini-lesson your students need. Your students can take notes on what you taught them/copy down information from your mini lesson, draw the graphic organizer you used, etc, in the Writing Notes of their Writer's Notebooks, like this: Then, students have time to do independent writing in the My Writing section of their Writer's Notebooks. In a beautiful world that did not have high-stakes, standardized testing, you could always let your students "free write" during this time, which is to say they can write about any topic in any form, and never complete an edited or published copy of anything ever. However, since we're teaching in the real world, this independent writing time is a balance between free writing and writing to a prompt/general theme. For me, it is probably about 30% free writing and 70% writing with some sort of guidelines, although even they can be very loose. It is my understanding that the "official" Writer's Workshop model does not ever "make" a student write about a prompt, but rather offers prompts for them to write about. In Oregon, we have a district assessment (which for 4th grade is reported to the state as well) for all of our students in which they must write to a prompt in essay form and take their writing all the way through the writing process. This is why I make sure that my students practice what they will be graded on (and what I will be judged on) so that they are successful. I try to do fun & flexible prompts so they are always interested; I'm planning a post on our personal narrative unit and our scary story/fall story unit, so check back for those soon! While your students are writing independently, you get to pull small groups (for advancement or for interventions) or conference with individual students. I look for students who have writing skills that are above and beyond fourth grade, and I'll pull that small group of students to work with so I can help them take their writing further. For every writing worksample we do (I try and do one about every other month but I'm constantly scanning their classwork, dictados, etc) I also form intervention groups. Some examples include students who are still struggling to capitalize the starts of their sentences, trouble identifying misspelled words, breaking writing into coherent paragraphs, staying on topic, adding sensory & descriptive words, capitalizing "I," etc. While the rest of the class is silently and independently writing, I pull these intervention students and do a mini-lesson/activity with them to help them develop the writing skills their missing. I also conference with every one of my students about every other month. After each work sample they do (as in a formal writing piece to a prompt or theme that they have not had outside help with), I grade them according to the 6 writing traits. Then, I meet with each student individually and discuss all the greatness in their writing. Next, I tell them a few things that they can work on, and they choose one of them to be their writing goal, and they record it in their Writing Goals section of their Writer's Notebook. They take a tiny sticky note and write their name on the front of it. On the back, they write their new writing goal. Then, they stick that goal to the writing trait that it falls under (like, "split writing into paragraphs with one main idea" would go under Organization). Until next month when we meet again, they will work on that goal. I usually have them tell someone else their goal, write it on a slip of paper to take home, read it to themselves with a whisper phone, etc about once a week to keep it fresh in their minds. The next time we meet, we see how they're doing with that goal; if they've got that one, we set a new one. Here are some examples of writing goals: Next, students share their work with others. This can be broken into two separate sections, as suggested in the top visual, with the first being time for students to share with a partner and then the whole class. I usually just leave 5-10 minutes for them to share, and I mix it up. Some days they share to a partner, some days to their table group, some days a few students share to the whole class, some days everyone shares to the whole class. I think this helps in keeping things interesting and helping them stay motivated; sometimes I tell them who they'll be sharing to, and other times I don't, so they always have to be doing their best work, and it makes it more exciting to share. Note: this is the easiest part to leave out of the Writer's Workshop process, but LET THEM SHARE! This is a great motivator for some students and what makes it fun too. This gives them an audience and a chance to get feedback from peers and you on a daily basis. Based on your findings from what you saw in students' writing that day, you can plan for tomorrow's/next week's mini-lesson and go from there. All that being said, I usually don't have a full hour of Writer's Workshop every day. Because I incorporate writing throughout the subject areas and do dictado, I simply don't have enough hours in the school day to fit in a full 60 minute Writer's Workshop time too. My writing time is usually about 30-40 minutes. I do a 5-10 minute lesson, 20-30 minute independent writing/conferencing time, and then a 5-10 minute share time. I don't think workshops, writing, math, reading, or otherwise, should be inflexible molds that are followed to a T. You know your students and what they need. You get to decide how to best meet their needs. Writer's Workshop is just an awesome way to organize your writing time, to help your students become better writers, and to ENJOY writing! That's why I've been using it ever since I found out about it around six years ago. My students love it, and I do too. Questions? What isn't working in your writing time? What's going well? Leave a comment to let me know what future blogs you'd like to see too. Happy Writing!

Dolley accepts a marriage proposal by James Madison, who had been engaged once before but never married.

Making anchor charts has always been hard work for me. In fact, I never liked making anchor charts for the classroom. I did it because it helps the kids, but I am not a fan of my handwriting, my drawing is even worse, and let’s not even talk about the time it takes to make […]

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Literary Essay We are just about to finish up our third writing unit from Teacher's College/Lucy Calkins, so I wanted to share how it went, what we did, what worked and what (definitely) did not work! This quarter we focused on writing Literary Essays, which, before working my way through this unit, I could not have explained to anyone! So, since I wasn't 100% sure what a Literary Essay was and I knew my students weren't either, we started by just reading a bunch of sample essays and discussing what they were. Our writing kit comes with access to several examples of Literary Essays written by students, so we read over a few of them and discussed our findings, and then I put together an anchor chart of all of the things we noticed (or that I wanted them to notice and they didn't). For the first bend of this unit, instead of using an actual text, we watched the Panyee Football Club Video and used that as our "piece of literature". Although I think it was a bit confusing for them that we used a video in the first bend and then used text in the second bend, I do think that this was a nice way to start the unit because they didn't mind watching, re-watching, and analyzing bits of the video over and over again. After watching the video a few times, I asked them to look for common themes, lessons, character traits, etc... I emphasized that one way to come up with a claim is to pinpoint something in the text/video that you have seen before and we discussed how the characters worked hard like the characters in many different stories and movies, how people didn't believe in them at first which we see in a lot of stories, etc... Below is a list of all of the claims that we came up with: After that, I had them pick a few claims and try out writing a thesis statement/lead/introduction (I'm trying to use all three terms so they know that they all mean the same thing). We used the graphic organizer below to do this and when students felt that they had one claim that they could write a strong thesis statement for, they chose that as the one that they would use to write the rest of their essay. Once we all had our claims and thesis statements ready to go, we worked on collecting evidence from the video in order to create strong body paragraphs. Finally, they wrote their own essays and I took home a stack of 36 papers ready to grade them all over the weekend. Unfortunately, however, when I started to read them, I noticed that more than half of both of my classes wrote summaries of the entire video instead of actual Literary Essays. They included quotes and plenty of details from the video, but they just did not seem to get that they were supposed to focus only on the parts of the video that supported their claim. At that point I decided to create a checklist for writing a Literary Essay and I used it to score all of their essays. Before giving the essays back, I showed them the checklist and had them use it to grade two of the sample student essays that we had looked at at the beginning of the unit. I think that seeing what I expected to be included in each section of the checklist as well as being able to read samples of text that included all of the necessary components really helped them to figure out what they needed to do. I gave them more time to edit and revise using the checklist and their second drafts were much better! For the second bend, they were able to choose their texts and they completed most of the writing process on their own with guidance when needed or requested. I hung up the chart below and had them stick a sticky note with their name on it to whichever step they were on each day. Our team agreed that the suggested texts for this bend were a little too long and complex for our students, so we decided on four short stories: (We just googled these titles and found PDFs of them online that we printed for the kids) Everything Will Be Okay by James Howe Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting The Marble Champ by Gary Soto Birthday Box by Jane Yolen* *Disclaimer: I cried when I read this one aloud to the class We did have to go back and review transition words and when/how to use them in the middle of this bend, so I made this chart as a reference tool: Now they are all typing up their essays and I will be grading them (hopefully) over spring break! If you are interested in using any of my anchor charts and/or graphic organizers that I created for this unit you can grab them here! Growing Words I have not been doing the best job of keeping up with our Growing Words (a.k.a. Greek & Latin prefixes, root words, and suffixes) this quarter so this week we dove back in to that starting with the Root Words Aqua- and Hydr-, which both mean water. On day 1 I introduced the root words using my little presentation that you can grab here. And for the rest of the week they followed the routine that they are used to & used some worksheets that are included in that product to further explore those root words. Guide Words Last week I posted all about my Word Reference Materials unit which worked out really nicely for most of my kids, but I have a few who are really struggling with answering questions about guide words. They just can't seem to wrap their mind around the fact that they need to alphabetize and check if a word comes after the first guide word and before the second guide word. I've been trying to give them some strategies to tackle these questions like writing the alphabet at the top of their page, putting the words in between the guide words and checking the alphabetical order, etc... I even made them this little anchor chart to refer back to, which sadly got a little crumpled in the laminator. Here is a digital copy in case you are interested in using it in your classroom! We practiced using these strategies with a few questions in a presentation that you can grab for free below!

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Greetings new friends! I am Crystal from Kreative in Kinder! I am so excited to guest blog for you. One of my favorite thing to teach is Writer's Workshop. I love creating Interactive Writing charts with my students. This is a great foundation for creating informational pieces of writing. This is an example of our writing towards the end of the year. We first finished up our unit on creating “How To” pieces of writing and have moved on to “All About” books. We had been studying insects, specifically ladybugs. After reading about ladybugs, we created this Interactive Writing chart together. The students wrote in the text and then each added their own ladybug art. I like for everyone to participate in some way. Then, all students have ownership over our work in the classroom. The next day, I taught my students what the word fact meant. I told them that it is something that is true and can be proven. Then, we talked about how we would write a book using facts. I modeled this by creating an “All About Ladybugs” book. Here is my chart example. Then, they took each selected a different topic to write about and used this paper to create their draft. Click to download. J After they filled out this page correctly, they took this information and created a three page book. (This is my favorite, lol) I was so impressed with how well my students did. They really understood what a fact was and why it was an important part of writing an informational piece….to teach the reader something. J I really have enjoyed all of our writing adventures last year. It amazes me to look back over a year to see how far they really can go when writing in Kindergarten. They can reach the bar so don't be afraid to set it high. They are little sponges and we are passing out the water. I hope you have a great school year! Come by my blog for other writing tips and freebies.

Hey friends! I hope you're enjoying your GLORIOUS 3-Day weekend. We don't get enough of these, do we? I have to say, I'm loving putting m...

Would you like to decorate your classroom with fun, hand-drawn anchor charts/posters? Do you simply not have the time to get them done? Well, you have come to the perfect place! I love making these engaging and appealing anchor charts. I also can draw/create any other topic you would like, just contact me directly and ask! My students absolutely love these posters and references them every day. Many of them are visual learners, so the colorful images really help them connect and remember what they have learned. This particular anchor chart is for readers/writers practicing main idea. My students absolutely love the fun graphics/visuals. They help them remember the importance of main idea and how details of a text relate back to the main idea. **These will be copies unless asked otherwise for a custom poster. They are not laminated, and are printed on normal, anchor chart paper. I ship these out ASAP after being ordered, but please keep in mind once shipped, it is outside of my control. Therefore, if shipping does not meet your expectations, I highly encourage you to please reach out to me first, and we have always been able to work something out to make up for anything that may have occurred after I have sent your package, thanks so much!! Hope you love it :)

If you need a writing anchor chart to help your students with visual references, this post has 9 must-make anchor charts to boost your writers.

Oftentimes, foodie fiction makes you hungry. But author Jessica Soffer recommends three books that deal with food yet aren't in love with it — books to read when you're on a diet, a desert island, or for whatever reason would like a peach tart to not be compared to a summer's day.