A Writing Strategy and a Spooktacular Giveaway!

I’ve been sharing a lot of writing tips lately but that’s because my school is really focused on writing so naturally I am as well.

The strategy I’m going to share today can actually apply to any subject!

For the second year in a row my teaching team and I have been giving students individual learning goals. We present our overall learning goal to our students as well as the success criteria (I can statements). There are usually around 5 statements we are working on. We found this to be a bit overwhelming for many students and there were also students who didn’t need to work on all of the criteria.

So, we decided to pick one goal at a time per student. We also wanted to make sure the students always had access to their personal goals so they would remember to apply it to their writing.

This is what we decided to do:

They need to read their goal before they open their book to get started with their writing.

Each time a student meets their goal I give them a different color star sticker. When they get their gold sticker (5 stars) they get to move on to a new goal.

My students get so motivated by getting those little stickers that they work their little behinds off to reach their goal. I found my student’s writing improved rather quickly just by doing this.

We print our goals on mailing labels and just stick them right on their writer’s notebooks.

And as promised there is a giveaway! It’s not my giveaway but my Weekly Sentence Fix Ups are one of the prizes.

Click on the image below to visit 2 Brainy Apples’ blog. You can enter her Spooktacular Giveaway there! She has a ton of products to giveaway to a few lucky winners.