Day Three of our Reading and Writing Project was all about the writing.  As a team, we decided that we needed to see what our students could write without our support.  When we went on our school-wide broadcast, we read the writing prompt and asked the students to write a written response.  We asked the teachers to allow the student to address this task on their own without scaffolding, outlining, or pre-writing with the students.

How long should this essay be?  How many words should we write?  These questions were asked in many of our classrooms by our students.  Students brains are trained to ask these questions.  Students were waiting for their teachers to respond with the answers. Instead, we all just stated, that you write whatever seems appropriate to you to answer this question.

Speaking to teachers and staff members involved with students as they were writing, they all commented that the students took the assignment very seriously.  It will be interesting to review the written work at our next collaboration time and see what the strengths and weakness are of our students as readers and writers.