Writing Goals

Need a way to motivate your students to WANT to write?? Make a "Writing Goals" board.

The goals include:

-capital letter to start my sentence 

-punctuation to end my sentence 

-use finger spaces 

-use sight words

-draw a picture with details 

-use neat handwriting 

-use uppercase and lowercase letters correctly 

-no floaters 

-write more than one sentence about the same thing

-5 star writing aka ready for 1st grade 

Our writing time starts with me modeling a sentence and then us writing a sentence together on the board. Then, we discuss our writing goals. I let the kids write about whatever they want, but for the kids that struggle with an idea I provide them with my "what do I want to write about" binder. It's a binder of themed word wall words (vocabulary words with visuals) to spark their interest

Which always works! I like to walk around and checkin with each child to make sure they are on task and see if they need any help or reminder of their goal. When they finish we conference at my desk. 

Conferences go like this:

1. Child restates their writing goal 

2. They read their sentence to me

3. We discuss together if they met their writing goal. If they did, we work together to assign a new goal for next time. And they also get a sweet treat; such as, a couple of M&Ms.

4. If they didn't meet their goal, we focus on something great about their sentence and discuss keeping them on their current goal for tomorrow. 

5. Then I assign them a number 1-5 based on our district writing rubric (which we've previously discussed together as a class so that they know which each number means)

5. Each student is always rewarded with a sticker of Their choosing from my giant sticker tub.

They get so excited to get new goals! And they are so excited to see what number they will get. This process has improved my students' independent writing and motivation to write!

Some other fun goodies we use are my spacemen and spaceladies to help them remember their spaces. They LOVE these. 

Every couple of weeks I also choose a celebrity writer which is a celebration of a student that wrote a wonderful sentence that includes most of the criteria to earn a 5 star writing rating. The winner gets a trophy and their paper displayed on the "Celebrity Writer" Bulletin board.