For our ALL session today I thought it would be nice for all group members to send an email to their parents with a snapshot of their writing. We have been focussing on hooking our readers by using rich, descriptive words that create mental images.
During our release time, each student chose a snapshot of their writing that they wanted to share and read it out as I typed for them. (Ideally it would have been better if the students typed their own email, however due to the fact that we didn't have any computers other than mine, we only had 45 minutes, and we were crammed into the principals office, I did the typing to ensure all 8 members sent an email).
Each students shared 4-5 descriptive sentences that would hopefully tantalise their whanau into wanting to read more. The students were super excited to hear the responses back from their whanau as well as being proud of the fact they had received an email at school.
This experience was something quite simple, yet powerful in engaging the families in our writing program. It also was a great way to build the relationship between school and home. The whanau also gave the students nice feedback about their snapshot of writing which I have printed out for the students to glue into their writing books. This serves two purposes. firstly as an example of writing for a purpose: a personal email, and secondly feedback and praise about the students writing from another source other than the teacher.
Below are some examples of the emails and the whanau response to their child. I have taken names out so the student and family identity are anonymous.
Student X email and response
Student Y email and response
Student Z email and response
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