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Monday, September 28, 2015

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?!?!

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