Year-Long Writing Curriculum "Handout"

Last summer I carefully planned out a year-long curriculum for my students. However, since this year was my first opportunity to integrate a year-long writer's workshop, I have been reflecting all year long on pieces that I have not been able to integrate as well as I would like to or realizing areas that I needed to learn more about in order to successfully integrate them. Some topics that I have studied have been: conferring and technology integration. In addition to continuing to explore technology, I will also be delving deeper into individual genre studies, better utilizing writer's notebooks, and social aspects of writing workshop.

Knowing that I wanted to re-visit my curriculum plan, I chose the year-long plan for my final project. Rather than pulling out my old map, I sat back and reflected on what is most important to me as a writing teacher. I choose to teach writing with a workshop approach because it fits my goal to not only move students toward meeting on state assessments but to become life-long writers. While my year-long curriculum will continue to change from time to time as I grow as a writing teacher, the following are core beliefs that will remain the same:

• Wide writing and reading across genres
• Writer’s notebooks to gather ideas and document everyday life
• Awareness and exploration of the writing traits
• Support in mechanics and editing
• Student reflection on self as writer and personal growth
• Opportunities to share writing

You can view the overview of my 6th-8th grade curriculum plan here. Even though this is as I will submit it, I still consider it a working document. Since creating it I have already considered ways that I would like to update it, such as incorporating multi-genre projects that I thought of after reading Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them. 

Many educators have shaped what I value in education. Some of the most influential in writing are:

Jeff Anderson (an alternative to Daily Oral Language to focus on good examples of sentences)

Nancie Atwell (workshop approach)

Donald Bear (and the rest of the Words Their Way team for word study)

Aimee Buckner (writer's notebook)

Troy Hicks (technology integration)

Penny Kittle (teachers as a mentor for process and workshop)

Mark Overmeyer (workshop and assessment)

(Note: This post is a requirement for my writing class. We each had to choose a final project and then create a handout for our classmates to share our learning. I decided to make a blog post for my "handout".)