Doc McStuffins and "Writing Syndrome"

So, my daughter Hadley, loves to watch Disney's Doc McStuffins.  For those of you who don't know, she's a little girl who diagnoses problems with toys and then fixes them.  She gives diagnosis a name like 'NoBatteryitis' or 'NeedsOilitis'.   It's super clever. 

Well, In writing yesterday, I was teaching how to revise our narrative pieces to make sure our writing sounded good.  Basically, do we repeat words (and, then, I, etc.)? OR do we leave out punctuation creating a whole page that is one sentence?  I had a sample of my writing that I had purposely made into a run on joined by a bunch of ands.  I was trying to get the students to revise my writing but they just couldn't see it.  FINALLY, after a ton of guesses someone said "you have too many ands Mrs. Green!"  It finally came to me!! I had 'anditis'!  So, I asked them if they had ever watched Doc and most of them had.  I told them that a lot of them needed to have a diagnosis.  Immediately they came up with a few 'syndromes' that they knew they needed to 'heal'.  I sent them off to write and within about 5 minutes we had a full list of them...it was a perfect way to get them to revise their own work! Look for our list to grow in our upcoming lessons!

Writing Buddy Conferences

We are working on 'zooming in' on our small moments in writing.  On Monday, the students used magnifying glasses to look at rocks and describe how they looked when they 'zoomed' in.  They then did the same with their writing using sticky notes to add details in their writing.  Today, they conferred with their writing buddies and gave each other ideas on details to add.  Below is just a little snippet of a conversation between Skyler and Morgan. I can't wait to listen in to more writing discussions!

Word Study

Small moment books