I just finished Culham's book this weekend, and there was so much to love. First and foremost, it is a good fit pedagogically. My school emphasizes teachers basing curriculum decisions on standards, and the majority of curriculum is teacher created with the standards as a guide. Our state's writing scoring guide revolves around the traits. Thus, the traits have already been front and center in my classroom this year.
However, as with many components, this school year has been one of figuring pieces of my literacy block out, and I was excited to have so many great ideas to more effectively familiarize my students with the traits and to help them grow as writers. Some of my favorite features of the book were: Think Abouts that accompany each trait (guiding questions for students to analyze their own writing), suggested comments for conferences for each trait based on different levels of current proficiency, and mentor texts. While reading I also made a lot of notes on how I will be able to adapt the ideas for my latest venture of student blogging that I will be starting next week.
I will refer back to this book often. It complements my other favorite resources well. The lesson ideas Culham explains give me many new fresh ideas to bring the traits to life, yet I will also still rely on other resources and my own ideas to fill out my curriculum, just as Culham suggests.
A final reason for excitement is that other teachers in my building are also implementing Culham's ideas. It is always beneficial to have vertical alignment, and since her books support our state's standards so well it is easy to get teacher buy-in. I expect that before too long school-wide we will be integrating her ideas. It will be great to share ideas across grade levels and to have a common language to discuss what we are doing to foster a love of writing in our students.
On March 2nd from 3:00-3:30 EST there will be a free webcast with Culham via Scholastic. I signed up in hopes that I will be able to have someone cover my class for a half hour since it will be during student contact time at my school.
This weekend we will be discussing the traits at my class, and we are supposed to bring in mentor texts that we can use to demonstrate one of the traits. I have not decided for sure yet, but voice is one of my favorite traits, and I have been thinking of bringing in one of Simone Ekeles' books as a mentor. Another book that came to mind was The Luxe as an excellent hook (organization) by starting out at a funeral but then mentioning that the casket is empty because the body could not be found after the character supposedly drowned. I was instantly sucked in analyzing how each funeral attendant was acting and thinking about all the possibilities of what was really going on.
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