What is Your Sentence?

Thank you to Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Tara, Beth, Anna, Kathleen & Deb for this amazing platform to write and share writing! What a wonderful community you've created! I'm honored to be part of it. Join us at Two Writing Teachers.

Today we took our writing notebooks out to write a sentence. Just a sentence. 

What is your sentence? I stumbled upon this amazing video from Daniel Pink's book, Drive. 

I asked my sixth graders this question. We decided that we'd like to see some examples, so I shared a couple of other videos with mentors of this sentence. 

We analyzed their sentences. We noticed that the sentences were written in the third person. We noticed that the sentences were written as if these things had already happened. We got lost in their words. 

It's time to write our own. We spent five minutes writing and rewriting our sentence. We added details. We rearranged words. We tried out new ideas. We shared. After a few students shared out loud, we split up into groups and revised our sentences. We wrote our final sentence on an index card.  Once again, I'm impressed. My students wrote and revised and shared. They thought deeply about who they are and who they want to be. We talked about our process of writing. "How did it go? How did you write your sentence?" Those conversations make the act of writing less scary (I hope). We noticed that everyone has a different process. I shared my process with them as I worked on my sentences for three blocks today and I'm not done. Here's a peek into my process…

They took risks and shared their hopes, their dreams, they shared themselves in their sentences. Here are a few of the sentences from my brave and talented sixth graders. Enjoy!

What is your sentence?!?!

This is Bella

Thank you to Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Tara, Beth, Anna, Kathleen & Deb for this amazing platform to write and share writing! What a wonderful community you've created! I'm honored to be part of it. Join us at Two Writing Teachers.

Good Morning! This is Bella. I am writing this blog post this morning because my mommy can't figure out what to write. She is struggling, so I decided to help her. I am going to write about our weekend. We had a wonderful weekend, but some weird things were happening!

Saturday was perfect. We took a long walk. I sniffed lots of good smells and enjoyed myself.

When we came home, Mommy and I played with my toys and then we cuddled together for a little while. I settled down to rest and all of the sudden there was all of this commotion. Mommy was taking things off of the shelves. All the things were coming off of the shelves. 

She was surrounded. I couldn't get to her. I paced back and forth while she moved things around. Some of the things on the shelves went into bags and into the garage and other things just went back onto the shelves. Finally, she was done!

Suddenly, it was happening again. This time, she was taking everything out of the closet. 

How big is that closet?!?! Things just kept coming out. 

Finally she moved things around, lots of it went into bags and into the garage and the rest returned to the closet. 

I didn't like this at all! There's too much craziness!!! Why is she doing this? When will it be over? Ahhhh, I thought, we are done.  We walked upstairs to my bedroom. It's my favorite room in the house! My crate is in there and Mommy's bed too! As I was deciding if I should go into my bed or rest on her's, once again clothes started flying around. 

What is happening?!?! I started worrying. Is she leaving?!?! She moves clothes around like this before she leaves me. I couldn't stop pacing...I started panting. I wanted to yell, "MOMMY, STOP!" but I don't talk. I watched her carefully...every moment. It lasted all day. She even started again on Sunday.  Finally, Monday we are done. No bags. No stuff. No chaos. Just rest. Me and my mommy. Together. I guess overall it was a good weekend. 

September Celebrations

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for the opportunity to focus on celebrations every week! September 19 will mark our 100th celebration! Please join us!

I love September. September means new beginnings and fresh starts. It reminds me of the new year in January. As teachers, we get this additional opportunity for a new year and I love it! 

I celebrate enthusiastic and sweet sixth graders and their parents. This week school started. We are getting to know each other. We are reading and writing a lot! Thursday was Back to School Night and I met lots of kind and supportive parents. I am blessed to work in such a wonderful school!

I celebrate my OLW of the year, FLY! 

This word has taken me places I didn't expect. I began writing a book this summer. It's about notebooks and how I keep them and how I use them with my students. Hoping this has an audience when I'm done. I'm hoping to get a publisher and get it published, but the act of writing it is amazing and powerful.

I've been sharing notebook pages each day on instagram and twitter with the hashtags #sharingournotebooks & #haseltinenotebooks

Please share notebook pages from you and your students!! I'm honored to have a blog post on Sharing Our Notebooks. Please stop by and check it out and use the hashtag #sharingournotebooks and #haseltinenotebooks

I celebrate unexpected beginnings. Not much more to say here...yet...but look for some new things coming... Off to do some more writing and reading! Enjoy your weekend!!