It's Summer Writing Time!

Whoop whoop! (This post is happier than last post...promise!) ;)

Today was my first day of the Summer Writing Project through UNCC. As I've been saying throughout my last few posts, this has been something I have been looking forward to for a while! We had our orientation back in May (check out how wonderful that was here) and today was our first official meeting and session to get this hardcore rolling.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

We began the day with a couple super cool improv activities that dealt with our name game (as done at orientation) and a Yes, And game about personal space.

Our group reviewing the Yes And game. (That's me in the orange!) :)

After our introduction, welcoming, and improv games, we worked on our Writing Timelines. These were really cool. We had a few minutes to think about important writing events, activities, and teachers throughout our lives. I realized through this activity that I really do not think I have had much relationships with writing. Womp womp. That's a little depressing...But that's why I am here; to get more experience with writing and bring that enthusiasm to my students!
Here's my timeline of the top five writing events and moments in my life.

My Timeline

We added our Digital Timelines to the front board.

Group Digital Timelines

Interesting movements within technology for our group.

The activity that I really liked today and will definitely use within my classroom to encourage writing, brainstorming, descriptive writing, and overall comfortable-ness with writing was the Murray Cards.

My Murray Cards!

Murray Card instructions.

One thing that really got me thinking today that I would like to look into more are the generalizations that I made after my Writing Timeline. After we created our timelines, we really thought about what the best event was in our writing career, the worst, our favorite writing, when we feel done writing, and then generalizations that we could make from our timeline to other writers. The generalizations I made were "Writing is Personal," "Writing is a source of a release," and "Writing lets you into new worlds outside your own." I think these generalizations really hit me today out of nowhere! But I feel like they are very big revelations for today. I have fallen in love with blog writing and I really feel that these generalizations derived from this passion. I believe that if my students had their own blog (rather than the KidBlog that we have for the entire classroom) that they would become better writers. I am really wondering if putting these "positive" generalizations, that I came up with today, up throughout my classroom would encourage students to become writers of their thoughts and opinions. I also wonder if a personal blog for each student would enhance these generalizations and give students an opportunity to write how they feel, as opposed to the formal writing that is done in the classroom? Good questions...I know...but I'll have to wait until 2013 - 2014 school year to determine the answer?

The first day of the Writing Project was a huge success! I can only imagine what is to come throughout the rest of this week and the next two! Here's to becoming a better writer :)