Writing Toolbox

Teaching in a collaborative classroom setting is so rewarding.  We'll get kids at the beginning of the year not know how and certainly not desiring to read and those same kids leave us so proud because they've learned how to read and they enjoy it! 

Yesterday we received our state testing data and we were overjoyed to see how our special education students did 15% better than their peers did the previous year in 4th grade. How do we do it? Well, our classroom spends pretty much the entire day doing stations. Notice, I didn't say busy work, I said stations.  They're either at one of the two teacher tables or working on differentiated learning stations.  It's evident that our use of Math and Reading stations has helped our students make tremendous gains.  I think it's time for us to expand our use to learning stations to Writing. This will prevent students from waiting in a needless line for an adult to conference with them over their writing.

Here's an easy station that can be thrown into the Writing station mix.  All the teacher has to do is update weekly spelling words, which we do anyway.

http://teacheristatales.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-05-14T17%3A01%3A00-04%3A00&max-results=7

This fabulous tic tac toe board and recording sheets can be downloaded for free at teacheristatales.blogspot.com.