Creating Norms For Sharing Out

In the front of our classroom in Rm. 206 is a chair. That chair is where students share what they've written during Writers Workshop. The lesson below is where students took the time to create norms for themselves.

OBJECTIVE
Students will create norms for the readers/writers chair in order for sharing out in the chair to take place in a way that promotes a learning community where all are respected.

Guide For Responding to Author/Readers Chair & Critics

• Provides tips for responding to the writer as a critic.
• List will grow throughout the year as we move forward.

Students share out about what they expect as writers sitting in the chair and as critics sitting in the audience from their classmates.

Strategies of Good Writers

• Writers choose subjects that have special meaning to them
• Writers focus on the most important moments
• Writers expand the moments and use the six senses (what they see, hear, smell, taste, feel and touch).
• Writers tell about their lives in the first person
• Writers create fictional characters based on their own memories.

Another Word For Your Glossary of Literary Terms p.171 (Writers Notebook)
Theme: a thought or idea the author presents to the reader that may be deep, difficult to understand, or even have a moral; Themes allow the reader to understand part of the author’s purpose in writing the book.

To do: Each time you read and write, ask yourself: The most important thing about this story is…

Close
We now have another artifact in the classroom listing what students will expect from each other as writers and critics. At some point, I'll take a photo of it and post it online.