Our writing unit encompassed a variety of disciplines and lessons over the three weeks of SummerPrep. In addition to working on their poems, the Daring Dragonflies enjoyed two shared reading cycles of different poems and a number of lessons on the basics of crayons, watercolor paints, and the color wheel. By the end of our unit, our students had each written an I Am From poem and created a self portrait in crayon and watercolor. With this goal in mind, my teaching partner and I worked backwards to take our students through the entire writing process, from brainstorming to publication, in addition to shared readings of our mentor texts and art lessons. We provided numerous opportunities for differentiation throughout the process. In our brainstorming lesson, students were able to draw or write down their ideas. We also created two poem templates, one more scaffolded than the other, and allowed students to choose the template they wanted to use. During our revising and editing lessons, students worked in small groups with either myself or my teaching partner. We created these small, focused groups to address varying levels of editing and revision needed in students’ poems. This small group method also allowed us to give students more personalized attention during our lessons. While some students worked in small groups with the teacher, we prepared an art lesson on the final self portraits for the rest of the class and they rotated between writing groups and artwork over the course of two days. By the end of our writing centers, all sixteen students had created a self portrait and had a chance to both edit and revise their poems.

We did end up removing the group poem from our writing unit for the sake of time. Some students were not finished with their poems and/or portraits in time to design and create a whole class poem, and we replaced this performance with a rendition of our students’ favorite song: Purple Stew. If I had the chance to re-teach this unit, I would have made time to keep the group poem. I also would have taken more time to review the entire writing process with our students so that they knew where we were headed from a learning perspective. Students knew that we were planning to create a poem and a portrait, but it may have been unclear that we were going to learn about our identities, about poetry, and about the writing process as well. My teaching partner suggested that we could have reviewed the unit objectives with students prior to beginning the unit and I agree that would have been a very useful idea. I will think about ways to incorporate unit goals and objectives into future lessons so that students know where they are headed as learners.