Writing in Room 8

I've never participated in a linky party so I'm awfully excited about this!  We're wrapping up our first Lucy Calkins unit of study.  We chose a piece to "fancy up" and learned all about looking at our writing with a "Writer's Eye"  - a great idea from Mrs. Phippen over at Laugh While You Learn.  I used Cara Carroll's awesome Writer's Eye posters and I have got to tell you - getting my kids to understand "editing" in the past was always a CHORE...and I always felt like I did a horrible job at it.  Looking at our writing with a writer's eye just made sense to my kiddos.

I added a little fun to it on a whim (don't you love when ideas come to you 10 minutes before you plan on teaching the lesson?!?) We made our own "Writer's Eyeglasses" from a template I grabbed here.  The kids decorated them all up and put them safely in their writing folders. 

On Monday we plan on pulling out the piece we plan to "publish" for our writer's celebration, we'll put on our writer's eyeglasses and will look to see if we did what writer's do (use upper/lowercase letters, use ending punctuation, etc.).  To make the lesson even MORE fun - I plan on wearing some crazy clown glasses which will magically become my very own writer's eyeglasses. 

On a side note:  Because I thought of the glasses on a whim, I sent a frantic email to the staff asking if anybody had any "crazy big clown glasses"...I'm sure you can imagine all the smarty pants responses I got. 

Happy Friday Everybody!