A great way to introduce ourselves to our students at the beginning of the year is to share who we are as readers and writers.
For reading, it used to be grabbing the stack of books from my bedside table and sharing with my students how they landed there. Today, it would be taking out my iPad and sharing what I’ve recently downloaded to my Kindle, iBooks and Nook app. They’d hear about what I learned about World War II while reading about a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy, how I learned from a health book that I need to make some changes to my diet, and the late nights I spent reading over the summer wanting to solve the mystery of “who did it.”
For writing, it would be sharing the personal anecdotes in the thank you notes I wrote to my friends, the journal recalling all the laugh out loud moments from my college reunion weekend, the letter to the neighborhood association requesting permission to modify my fence to keep my puppy from escaping my yard, and a letter of recommendation for a colleague moving to a new school district.
What can we accomplish by doing this? We authentically show our students that real readers and writers have a purpose that drives them to read and write. Too often, the only motivation our students have to pick up a book or a pencil is the anticipated outcome of a grade. No wonder they feel that way if we are telling them what the title of every book or article they must read and providing a prompt for every idea they put on the page.
After sharing ourselves, we can pull out our journals and show our students how our own interests brought us to these selections. One of our first journals might be as simple as What Matters to Me. And for those students who struggle with that, we might give them sum subtopics like sports, free time fillers, hobbies, family, things I love, things I hate, things I want to know more about.
As we share ourselves with them, we have an opportunity to begin introducing some essential guidelines for creating a safe respectful classroom environment for our students, a must-have in a reading/writing workshop classroom. It gives us the opportunity to talk about No Trespassing (No one has the right to offend another) and No Hunting (no “shooting down” anyone else’s ideas) in our classroom.
How wonderful it is to get students so excited about reading and writing that they don’t even think to ask the question, “Is this for a grade?”
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