My first beginning of year writing assignment in our writer’s workshop is something I have been doing for 23-24 years now. When I was a new teacher, I found it while searching for classroom icebreakers. I wish I knew who posted about it, so I can give him/her credit.
My Writing Assignment – Part 1
This writing assignment actually starts off with me. First, I write a letter to my students. In this letter, I’m introducing myself so my students get to know me as a person. However, in my letter, I’m modeling voice, word choices, and establishing mood and tone. Yet, my students aren’t even aware of that consciously. One cool thing about this is that I have a collection of these letters that I’ve written over the years. If I could only find all of those computer files!
After I’ve welcomed them to our writing workshop and some examples of what we’ll be doing together, I tell them what I want them to know about me as a person. See the example below where I talk about caring about other people and wanting to help my student writers be successful in school and in life. I also talk about how important it is for our classroom to be safe from bullying and harassment, and that my expectation is we all respect one another. In the next paragraph, I explain what I want students to know about me as a teacher. This is where I discuss my previously published books and that I write on a weekly basis in my business at home. My students know I’m serious about writing. Next, I tell them why I chose to teach creative writing. I explain how my grandmother gave me a love for storytelling. The final paragraph is where I ask students to write back to me.
My writing assignment – Part 2
When I ask students to write a letter back to me, I ask them these three to four questions:
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- What do you want me to know about you as a person?
- What do you want me to know about you as a student?
- What are some ways you express yourself in writing?
- What makes you curious?
I give students a couple of days to compose their letters during writing workshop time, and then they submit them electronically through Canvas, our learning management software. You could have them print the letters and turn them into you, or use Google docs and turn them in through Google Classroom.
How I use this Beginning of the Year Writing Assignment
As I read through their letters, I have my school’s attendance program open, which shows student pictures. This way I can put a name with the face. An alternative to this would be having students take a selfie and add it to their document. This would help you to get to know faces with names and their personalities all at once.
Next, I give students credit if they followed the directions as given. If they do not, I conference with them and have them revise. I need actual writing to see where they are in their writing skills. This letter helps me to determine what students need from me. For example, if I receive quite a few letters without the word “I” capitalized, I know that I need to do a mini-lesson on how to fix that. Another example might be sentences that all start the same way. I could do a lesson on sentence variety.
Although I generally know which skills I want to teach during writing workshop mini-lessons before the school year starts, I leave space within my daily plans to address editing and revision lessons.
How I answer back to this writing assignment
Sometimes I will write comments back, but students either don’t read them electronically or don’t know how to check for that. So, I have a couple of options. I could teach a lesson on how to get to the comments section in Canvas. It’s inside the Grades link. Or I can conference with each student. I like this option better because it sets up how I will be helping them with their writing. Since I have 160 students, it takes me about 2 weeks to do this, but it is really worth it to build up rapport with my students.
If you’ve never started class before like this, I strongly recommend trying it. I learn so much about my students, and it helps to build a respectful classroom environment from the beginning of the year.
Back-to-School Writing Assignment Resource:
I now have this included in my Back-to-School Writing Activities resource in my Teacherspayteachers store:
