Workshop Wednesday - Winning Words

I am joining Ideas by Jivey for her Workshop Wednesday on writing.

Two summers ago a group of colleagues and I did a book study on this book:

I found so many great ideas for improving my students' writing, as well as my own writing.

One of the ideas suggested in the book is to post sentences with unique word choices from great mentor texts.  I prepared an anchor chart for this at the beginning of the school year, but had an AHA moment on the first day of school.

The students did a simple writing piece, and when one student shared his work (which included great word choices) I thought, "Why don't I post sentences from the students that could serve as model work?"

This chart is from last school year.  When I first started posting sentences with winning words, I would also label the sentences with the initials of the student who wrote it.  In any case, the students are so proud to have their work posted for everyone to see.  It really is a motivator, especially for reluctant writers.

The other students also use this chart to improve their own writing.  I underline the parts of the sentence that are "winning words" and others use those parts in their own way in their work.

I still include super sentences from actual mentor texts, and this supports the idea that students are really authors, just like those people who have published work.

Just wanted to share a letter that one of my students wrote to a future third grader during the last week of school.  I was so proud of how well my my learners did with paragraphing and using voice (aka winning words). 

Hope you'll add your ideas to Workshop Wednesday!