It’s the last day of our term break holidays and I’m planning our unit on Personal Experience Writing. I really would like my student’s writing to be meaningful and authentic this time (because I’ve been inspired by reading Bruce Schauble’s blog, and the Reflective Teacher’s blog about their student’s writing) – heck I’d really like my students to improve their writing and go from “telling me” to “showing me”!

So I began this afternoon by googling “ideas for personal experience writing”. I knew I would walk away with some pretty good ideas for a unit but I never thought I would find this site: WritingFix

“WritingFix is purposely organized around the 6 traits of writing. The 6-Trait model is an analytic way of thinking about writing skills. It helps give developing writers a vocabulary so they can identify and talk about their personal strengths as writers. It also helps them develop a vocabulary for talking about where their writing might benefit from some further rethinking and revision. The WritingFix website is dedicated to giving students and teachers a better ability to use 6-Trait language in the classroom.”

WOW! This website is just jam-packed with resourses and awesome ideas for encouraging students, not to just write, but to write better. It is also interactive for students too – if you want to use that feature.

I made a google notebook (another cool tool) for my Personal Experience Writing Unit while I was surfing this site. You can look at it incase you haven’t got time to navigate all around WritingFix and believe me, you will need some time to look around this site.
Now, I’ve just got to go write up type up my unit plan ……………………..