I tell my students, “Five points extra credit on the last Monday in school to anyone who still has their name-tag stored in their notebooks.” And I honor that. I always used 8.5″ x 11″ card stock, folded in half so it would stand on its own, as our name-tags.
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We make those name-tags in the first week of school, and we build our name-tag a pocket in our writer’s notebook. I believe in having my students keep a desktop name-tag in their notebooks, especially in the first month of school, because I want them to call each other by name when we talk about writing.
Time for writing how to#
I learned how to fix that issue by establishing rotating Sacred Writing Time Partners. In every class there was one or two students who dominated sharing, and that gave the non-sharers an opportunity to tune out. Sacred Writing Time Partners - In my early days of being a teacher who had the kids keep journals, I would encourage sharing. Purchase our entire set of 366 Sacred Writing Time slides at Teachers Pay Teachers. Here are four favorite slides from the 366-SWT-slide collection: Our SWT slides are used worldwide, but in my classroom, they acted as a “billboard” that announced they better have their writer’s notebooks in front of them at the bell because we’re obviously starting with SWT, and begin with SWT is what we usually did.
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Time for writing free#
I stress the importance of doing it at home–that’s where I do my coloring in my own notebook.īecause of my work with the National Writing Project (who also introduced me to the term sacred writing time), I had begun designing my E/LA instruction to always begin with writing time, so as my students entered for that block of time, they were greeted–daily–by one of the few products we sell at Teachers Pay Teachers for the purpose of keeping this website online and free to use. By the way, they can do some drawing, of course, which is clear if you look at my notebook the drawing always comes AFTER the writing, and that’s the rule I enforce. As long as their “pencils are dancing” and they are writing and not drawing or coloring a drawing, they are engaged in SWT. They can write about any topic, using any format in their writer’s notebook. In the ten minutes I give them called called Sacred Writing Time, they are allowed to have fun with their writing they are encouraged, in fact.Įvery day, for 10 minutes before the big writing lesson of the day (plus two more minutes for sharing–but only if all students were 100% engaged during SWT that day), they write in their writer’s notebooks. Not all in school writing assignments are necessarily fun, but we every day we have to be practicing and perfecting our writing skills. Even if there was a substitute in charge instead of me! My website is named “Always Write” for a reason I believe in the depths of my heart in the importance of daily writing, and we write a lot every day in my classroom. No, it was sacred it the fact that it always happened. Sacred Writing Time was simply that: sacred. I say that with one serious request: please don’t use SWT as your ten minutes to take roll and prep your day–SWT works so much better if you walk among your writers, encouraging them every day, or–and this works best–popping down in a seat next to a slow writer and writing in my own notebook. That way, a visitor to ALWAYS WRITE can consider the two tools–writer’s notebooks and sacred writing time–separately, perhaps adapting them to be used in a different way than I did.
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For that reason, I gave Writer’s Notebooks its own page of resources that I am sharing at this website as well.Īnd only my Sacred Writing Time ideas and resources will be stored on this page. Which came first? Sacred Writing Time or Writer’s Notebooks? In my classroom of 30 years, these two essential tools/ideas evolved in partnership, but they always seemed like two very different things working together, each serving a slightly different purpose.