Monday, February 4, 2008

Walking the Talk

When I got back to school, Maria Mallon dropped by to bring me a piece of writing that had been done by Ryan during our live lesson to the America's Choice conference in Hollywood. During the conference we dropped into Maria's class for a Writers' Workshop. Ryan was working on the following piece:
Today at school we got video taped. We had a TV in our class. We have a fun teacher. Then we ate lunch. Then we played outside. The TV went back to California. I was delighted!

I wonder if Ryan thought his piece was a 1, 2, or 3 on his classroom rubric? Bet he could rate each element of the rubric and decide what the paper needed to move to the next level!
Debbie Harbour, another of our kindergarten teachers presented a session at the conference on the vocabulary that we wrote as a professional learning community, based on the work of Beck and McKeown, and are currently teaching to our youngest learners. She will be very pleased to know that Ryan used the word "delighted" in his writing in Maria's class which was one of the vocabulary words that he learned from Red Riding Hood. Just goes to show how we really do walk the talk!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

dayle,
I think there is so much to be said about vocabulary and so many different ways to learn it. From Kylene's webs and focusing on the greek prefixes, and from the read alouds and word walls and from Rasinski's activiities. I am very excited about it. I am really trying to bring words out of my read alouds, put them on MY words wall and then have the students "harvest" the words they want to keep on their individual word walls. So exciting, thanks for sharing what others are doing.
CC