Chapter 2 Thoughts

I believe that celebrating students writing is very important. When my second graders finished writing their fairy tales we were able to share with each other and with other teachers and the students were so proud. I was amazed at how awesome each fairy tale turned out and how creative each student was. This was a specific writing project that I modeled for my students and I could tell how much they learned from watching me write my fairy tale first. We even celebrated by watching a classic fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast to wrap up our unit. The students still want to write their own fairy tales and love to read them as well.
The author says that teachers should only model as much as students are able to write. I never really thought about that, as I reflect on my own modeling, I was modeling way to much probably making it difficult for my students to pick out the main ideas of what I wanted them to know and do. As I continue to model for my students I will take this into consideration and model only as much as I want them to write.


I would love to teach poetry in my classroom but have never really tried. I don't feel that I would be a very good model. I have incorporated reading poetry once a week in my classroom and responding to the poetry with words and a picture and making it into a poetry book for the students.