Winner

What is a winner, exactly?

We ran a 1 mile race in our community last night with the whole family.  My marathon runner husband, my two kids, and myself were signed up.  All of us have different running experiences, of course.  My son is starting to get some running endurance, while my daughter isn't quite at his pace yet.  I have always dreaded the mile run my whole life.  DREADED IT.  And my husband runs miles in his sleep.  But, we all signed up for this race together.

Winning for my son?  He thinks he won the race.  There were a 1 mile and 2 mile race going on concurrently, and he thinks he was the first 1 miler that came in.  They didn't track the 1 mile for placement, so we have no way to know really.  But, he thinks he won.  At the Kids' Dash after, they all got Winner medals, and after a while he asked, "Wait?  Why does everyone have one?  Even the ones who fell down get one?"  His definition of #winning is clearly different than mine.

I won because I finished that race.  My job was to stay with my daughter.  Yesterday I discovered that she is faster than me now.  Not much of a winner in running I guess, but I fought to keep up with her.  That's winning on the mom side.  Plus, I didn't take the chips at the end.  And, my kids got to do pull ups on a bar with service men. #winning

My daughter seemed ok with the fact that her brother beat her, even though on the way to the race she argued with us that she is the fastest runner in the family.  My husband was waiting near the finish, and my husband and son cheered for her while they ran in with her.  That was winning to her.  That, and she won a free shake on the Chick Filet prize wheel.  #winning

For my husband, this was the first race that we ran that he didn't register as a runner.  He usually runs these races in hopes for a medal.  He decided not to enter the 2 mile run.  This time, he chose to do the 1 mile walk/run so that he could run with his kids.  #Winning for dad. 

What does this have to do with my writing life, as the #btbc16 post for today is supposed to be about?  Well, I think that, as a writer, I have started to be able to see things better from other perspectives.  Writers have to choose their characters, and how they tell their story.  I could write a story about this race from all four peoples' perspectives.  Mine would be the easiest to tell, but not the best story perhaps.  As a writer, I have started to see that. I haven't mastered it, but I am on that journey as a writer. Being able to tell a story, and teach others how to tell their own stories?

That, my blog friends, is #winning. 

Narrative Writing Standard Annotating

     What are those fantastic teachers looking at so intently, you ask?  Writing samples from the Calkins Units of Study.  They are exploring narrative writing samples in a collaborative effort to find the "bar" when it comes to narrative writing.

     Our school district purchased the Units of Study in writing last year, and this year the Writing Core Leaders are asking that we gather samples of student work that meets or exceeds the standards for every grade, with the purpose of sharing those across the schools as student work examples.  The question is, what does it look like to meet or exceed on the Common Core standard?  It might be easy enough for us to look around our own classroom and pick out the best writing samples, but are those really meeting the CCSS standard?

     In an attempt to find out, we spent a building meeting where we took the on-demand narrative samples from Lucy Calkin's units and blew them up onto a poster.  That way, we had samples that she  feels meets the standard for each grade level, but the story is always a story about a girl named Sarah and her dog.  It was easy to see the progression of writing development from K to 5th grade.

     Before they got started, I had a team member from each grade level get up and hold up Standard 3 from their grade level writing standards.  We could see from where we were sitting just how complex the standard gets as it moves along the grade levels.  We told them to read the standard as a team, and then use the standard and find evidence of it in their grade level writing sample.  Mark it up, code it, etc.

     When they were finished, we had them hang up their writing sample and their standard on the wall.  We then did a gallery walk where they were able to look at the samples across the grades, and notice any patterns and make observations.  

     What did we notice?  Well, our conversation made us aware of a few issues.  Our students still need to work on their volume of writing.  While we have a few students at each grade level who can produce samples like those, many cannot.  We, as a staff, will have to continue to brainstorm ways to increase their stamina and volume.  We also need to focus on purpose and audience when writing within the genre, and less on the small details included on all those checklists and rubrics.  If our students write a great lead, but have no idea why they are writing a narrative in the first place, then they will never create samples like this on their own.  

     Here are the samples, marked up by the Hiawatha teachers.  

*Some grade levels did not finish in time, so they are a work in progress.