The Long and Winding Road...

...towards writing competency continues in 8th grade. (As does the ever-encouraged push towards personal organization! We'll get there yet!) 8th graders have been hopping with multiple writing assignments in process at the same time. Much like juggling, the effort required no small amount of focus and attention to detail as well as deadlines on our students' parts in order not to get caught with several writing pieces on their desktop (versus mine) at once. In the past several weeks, we've wound up the Significant Adult Reflection, wrote a Literary Letter to a favorite author in hopes of winning the national prize of $10,000 for our 8th Grade Library, and created our High School Essays for our upcoming High School Application packets. Each writing assignment was put through the multi-draft writing process (Rough Draft/ Editing Guide/Revised Rough Draft/ Final Draft.) On Tuesday we "sentence sweat-shopped" the problem sentences from our High School Essays and are in the process of generating the final draft (due on Friday.) We will mail our Literary Letters away on that day as well.

With regards to organization - both personal and academic, we discussed systems that work for us at our Wednesday morning 8th grade community meeting. Here are some of the excellent suggestions from individual 8th graders:

• Make good use of class time
• Keep a running list of your "open" assignments and refer to it often
• Prioritize: plan ahead and set your own internal deadlines
• Make sure your binder is well-organized: clean it out regularly; store old assignments elsewhere
• Develop a personal system for regularly checking the teachers' blogs for assignments and updates
• Use your file drawer effectively to keep assignments in order
• Put your personal schedule on the iGoogle calendar account that Bert helped set up so that it interfaces effectively with our school schedule and assignments
• Use the calendar and "alarm" in your cell phone to remind you of upcoming assignments
• FOLLOW THROUGH ON YOUR ORGANIZATION PLAN!

Per usual, I was completely impressed by the collective wisdom of our 8th grade community!