I have two doors in my classroom that are "growing" as we march through the year.  I thought I would share their progress with you as this first semester ended. My front door is a year long record of our classroom learning.  I call it the "Graffiti Door" and at the end of the day, I ask the students to share something they learned over the course of that school time.  After listening to a few, I choose one of those students to add what they said to the door. This serves two purposes.  One, it gives all of the students a chance to remember what we learned that day, so when they go home, they can actually share something with their parents who ask.  Two, it allows the students to contribute towards are growing set of learning.  They LOVE being the one to write on the door (with our fancy markers that write on black paper), so they are very eager to share an idea.  Even the typically shy kids will get in on this action. You can see how this has grown. The s...
I have to get this off my chest.  I am tired of always publishing writing on a plain piece of paper.  Seriously, I am bored to death of it. So, in an attempt to get away from publishing paragraphs on a nice, lined piece of paper, I gave my students some index cards instead.  The students wrote narratives with the key element of conflict as a prominent feature. (we were wrapping up our Conflict in 5 Days unit.  You can read more about it here .) After they finished their draft and revisions, I gave them index cards for their final draft.  Each student received five cards.  First, they wrote the entire story on the cards (since this was basically a paragraph sized story to begin with, I knew that they wouldn't need too many cards.)  Most kids used 2 or 3 cards to write the entirety of their story. Next, I asked the students to turn the remaining cards over and draw a picture.  The first picture needed to be a cover page, with the title of their conflict story as well as th...