“You can tell a good writing classroom by the presence of the child’s interests in the room.” This quote from Lucy Calkins book Lessons from a Child describes one of the features of a good writing environment. If the writing environment is arranged the right way children will be interested and want to write!
Writing environments need to be simply set up and regularly scheduled.
This supports the complex work-in-progress . If writing time is sporadic or squeezed into random fractions of the day the quality of student’s writing will suffer. Writing is not valued in scattered time frames, it is very important to build a consistent simplistic writing structure.
Creative challenges and critical thinking work much better this way. Students work with one another by brainstorming, sharing, editing and revising which is where the real creativity comes into play.
