Self Assessing and Goal Setting

Look at these earnest writers! Here we are about seven days into our unit writing informational books, or teaching books. We've begun with doing this kind of writing with topics we already know a lot about. Today we spent some time taking stock of the writing we've done so far, noticing what we are doing really well, and each choosing a goal or two to work on to improve our informational writing. We looked at a checklist of first-grade end-of-year goals for this type of writing. I could barely hold back many of the students who wanted to improve or fix up their writing in certain ways as we discussed the checklist. They each wrote a goal on a post-it, and went to work improving their current piece of writing. Many of us realized we needed an ending, or a beginning where we state the topic, or that we could improve our book's teaching power by putting labels in the pictures, adding lists with commas, or capitalizing names of specific people and places. Next week we'll learn about chapters and tables of contents...