These kids get very excited when they witness thier work getting "published" virtually before thier eyes. They also love the idea of collaborating to create a book that can be read to them, and shared with other classes, friends, and family. On Monday, we read a book that The Dolphins (last year's K class) wrote just prior to Thanksgiving.  Well afterward, the Black Bats had plenty of ideas of what to put in our book! They loved this important process in the emergent writing journey. If you have not seen it yet, do not fret it will always live on our classroom library.

As we dive deeper into Writer's Workshop, we are focusing on the little pieces that make our writing neat and desirable for readers. First, we want to make sure that we are writing stories that other people will want to read. How do we use writing to tell a story that we have in our head, and what pictures are going to be most effective in telling our story? Second, we went over the specific parts of our writing journals. How do we keep it neat? How do we know where to start and stop our writing? Storybooks like, The Best Story, can help guide us through the storywriting process.

This week in Writer's Workshop, we learned two letters, Ww and Xx. Routine brought us to use our Orange Handwriting Books and the Wet, Dry, Try activity to practice writing those letters correctly. In addition, we did an activity where we learned how to start at the left of the page and end at the right.

In order to prep for our Halloween party, the Black Bats read a book about a haunted house written by last year's Dolphins class. We decided we wanted to recreate something similar to what was done last year, and worked together as a class to create our own picture book about what we find in our own haunted houses. Each student got to create one page in our book with the lead, "In my haunted house there is...". Through collaboration, the students were able to create a fantastic story book that we shared with the visitors who joined us at our Halloween party.