Teach Writing Right

I'm going to make it my personal  "Friday Practice" to always sketch and photograph the next week's (Mr. Stick-inspired) Metaphor of the Week before I leave for the weekend.

We've spent the first week of school pre-writing and planning our writers' notebooks introductory pages.  My sixth graders are working on a page dedicated to their personal treasures; my seventh and eighth graders are creating showing riddles, inspired by WritingFix's Lesson of the Month for September.  Can't even begin to tell you how much easier it is to inspire my kids because I can show them my teacher-model of a writer's notebook page before I send them into the pre-writing process.

I've decided next week's Metaphor of the Week will be : "A Writer's Notebook is a Personal Treasure Chest."  Next week, we'll be reading the forward to Ralph Fletcher's A Writer's Notebook: Unlocking the Writer in You, and it will mesh nicely with this metaphor.

Here is the display my students will see as they file in after their Labor Day weekend.  Click on the image to see it in larger form.

Again, if you have ideas for good metaphors about learning, life, and tools of learning, I hope you'll share them with me.