Monday Musings - Celebrate!

Many people think of celebrations as a time to get together with family/friends for a birthday, , wedding, anniversary or other reason for a party.  I would bet that some of your greatest family memories may come from one of these special events.

In school, we need opportunities to celebrate too and can do so for a variety of reasons.  When we celebrate together it can be a great way to motivate our students and to reinforce what we value (learning, hard work, bucket filling, etc.).  When we celebrate, it helps build the momentum for the work that we do and it's just fun! Several years ago we started our Friday celebration with the purpose of having students reflect on something that they are proud of for the week, have some students share their reflections on the announcements and get to dance/celebrate together.  We have been using our opportunities of sending high school athletes off to state competition to build a culture of Dodgeland Pride.

Image from careereallism

This year, I am excited to see the writing celebrations that are already starting to take place as students get to publish their work at the end of the unit. As you celebrate with your students, keep in mind that this is also a celebration of your work:

• Taking on a huge new way of teaching writing that you haven't had experience with before. 
• Reading every day so you know how to teach the next session. 
• Growing yourself as a writer as you learn the writing tips that you're going to impart with your students and be ready to share your own writing in mini-lessons. 
• The time you took with your students to practice/rehearse the procedures to make the writing workshop an efficient use of students' time for writing. 
• The time you have taken to get to know each of your students individually to help pull out their ideas/experiences to add into their writing. 
• Your attention to the teaching points in effort to keep the mini-lesson focused and mini so that students could spend more time writing. The more time they spend writing, the better writers they will become. 

This list could go on and on.  My point is, we have a lot to celebrate at this point of the year already, so please take some time to enjoy it with your students and be excited for the growth that is yet to come. I would love to see when your class is celebrating/sharing published work, so please let me know when it is scheduled and I will try to make it. 

And for our teachers that are not teaching writing, I didn't forget about you.  Please take some time to reflect with your students on the hard work you've accomplished in your content area so far and celebrate together too!