My Summer Writing Retreat

Our district English Language Arts consultants, Fran and Colleen, offered two 1-day training sessions this summer to help familiarize teachers with the common core standards for writing, with an emphasis on informational writing. Both sessions provided lots of time for teachers to write. Fran and Colleen stressed that if we expected our students to write, we needed to write ourselves. Each session started off with teachers writing about a summer memory.  After everyone wrote for about 15 or 20 minutes, we talked about our process. As we chatted about all the decisions we made as writers and shared snippets from our pieces, we asked each other questions about the details in the pieces or noticed craft. Teachers then had an opportunity to learn about or review Barry Lane’s technique for playing with time called Explode-a-Moment. We went back into our summer memory pieces and decided where we wanted to slow down time.


We also read about how to create a sense of era from the book Nonfiction Mentor Texts (pages 93-94) by Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli. Each time we revisited our pieces, we applied our new learning. The experience taught me that if I was going to help kids love writing informational and opinion pieces as much as narratives, I needed to write informational and opinion pieces. At the very least, I needed to expand my understanding of the range of informational writing. As much as I love new learning, the most enjoyable part of the training sessions for me was the writing and the talk about the writing. Maybe someday I will get to attend a NWP summer institute. Until then, I’m happy to keep writing along with my district colleagues.



I wrote about the summer I went to gymnastics
camp. I tried to create a sense of era by
including details about the 1972 Summer Olympics.