In our school, we have a WIN time, which is What I Need.

Some students need math help, while work with reading, writing, other leadership ideals, and other areas. My WIN group is set up for almost all of that. We have Mondays where we are reading non-fiction articles and writing about them. Tuesdays are geography practice. Fridays are Free Read Friday, of course! 🙂

#lame

Hush. But Wednesdays used to be Writing Wednesdays, where students created a document and simply wrote. 20 minutes of writing. Well, our Wendesdays turned into “Working on it Wednesday” or WoW, so Thursdays turned into Thoughtful Thursdays. Again, 20 minutes of writing time on any topic they want.

Sounds easy, right?

#ha

You are so right. You’d think that someone had caused the worst accident in the world, canceled their favorite foods, and taken their phones, all at the same time. The amount of “Awww man, why” that I get when it’s Thursday is astronomical. However, as I look out over my students, 95% of them have their documents out and are at least ATTEMPTING to write. I have these two boys right in front of me who are messing with one of those fidget spinners, so, they are distracted. We’ll see if they are paying attention to this or not. I’ve got others whispering behind me, but for the most part, the effort is being made. Some of them are noticing that this is posted up on my video board, which is always fun. I don’t get this opportunity as much, being a social studies teacher, to share my own writing process.

For me, this task is easy. It’s about that idea of writing stamina. I’ve got the topic (their writing) and could write for 20 minutes with very little effort. I can sit down and kick out something like this in 20 minutes. Why? Because you have that topic, and you train yourself to write. Some of the go through our writing prompts, distracting themselves away from the task at hand. Pick something and go. I keep my fingers on the keyboard and simply keep the words going. I’ve written and deleted and written and deleted and that’s ok.

However, now, my class is practicing the art of distracting themselves, so I’m going to go back to being a snarky teacher. I love this day because we do have those creative students who don’t always have that opportunity to write, just for themselves. My hope, they learn that writing can happen at any time because, some days, you just have stuff to get out and this is a great medium to do so.

To close, I just looked up and I find my school picture, colored purple because that’s my favorite color.

They are so weird. 🙂