Friday, July 11, 2008

Action Plan

I have learned so much during my time at OWP and there is so much I am going to use in my classroom and continue to apply to my own writing. My goal for next year is simply to incorporate as much writing as possible into my curriculum and my own life.
I want my all of my students to keep a journal and write in this journal for about 10 minutes, hopefully, everyday. My plan is to have portfolio assignments every grading period in which students will pick one or two things they wrote to workshop and turn into me. I would like to use some type of blog weekly or bi-weekly based on computer access.
I learned a lot about writing when I was putting together my demo. I did a lot of research about the benefits of personal writing in the classroom and how this type of writing can help students academically. I plan to encourage my students to use their own personal experiences as inspiration for their writing, but then give them the opportunity to branch away from that.
I plan to incorporate "writing territories" from Kim's demo very early in the year and then encourage my classes to use this to write their journal entries. I also really liked the idea of using historical fiction for research writing, collaborative writing from Genesis's demo, and the pre-writing activities from Stacey's demo.
I liked what Chris suggested about mimic poetry and I also really liked Joshua's episodic fiction idea. It is really hard to list everything I liked because every one's demo was so incredibly useful and I plan to incorporate some aspect of most of the demos into my classroom.
The OWP has had such a profound effect on what I plan to do next year. I feel that it has already had such a positive influence on who I want to be as a teacher. I have a new understanding and appreciation of what writing should look like in the classroom.
Thanks OWP!

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