Last night was Earth Hour!  My family and I had an AWESOME time in the dark.  At about 8:15 we searched for candles and lit them all and began the count down.  At exactly 8:30 we switched off the lights and the fun began!  Well actually, we just sat and talked.   During the hour my mom said, "Isn't it cool how much conversation you can have with the TV off?"  The hour passed by so fast!  We were havig so much fun that we decided to continue our Earth Hour until morning.

What did you do during Earth Hour?  Please leave a comment to tell the Woodsters what you did to celebrate!

On Friday March 28, 2009 Earth Hour is inviting you to turn off your lights from 8:30 to 9:30pm. Last year 5 million people participated in Earth Hour.  And in 2007 Sydney, Australia participated with 2.2 million people.  This year Earth Hour aims for more than 1,000 cities and 1 billion people to participate.  So vote Earth and go to EarthHour.org  for a video and more information.  So save Earth and fight against global warming.

file:///C:DOCUME%7E1twoodLOCALS%7E1Tempmsohtml1%EF%BF%BD1clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List" /> Over the past three months the Woodsters have been working diligently on personal narrative writing pieces.  We began our work with generating ideas and spent weeks writing 'seed stories' in writer's notebooks.  These seed stories were inspiration for a bigger project, a piece to take 'through the writing process.' 

To start, the students chose and told their story trying to evolve from telling about their experience like a news reporter to telling their story like a master story teller.  After telling their story MANY (some more than 20) times, the Woodsters created a storyboard to help them write.  After a quick lesson on writing leads and endings, the students began their drafts.

This is where the project really took off.  Upon completing first drafts, the students typed up their work on our class wiki.  We used the wiki as an editing and publishing tool for many reasons.  First off, the Woodsters had access to their work whether they were in school, at home, at daycare, or even away on vacation.  This made it very easy to get the students work typed up.  Another reason we used the wiki was to create a discussion about each piece.  The students started a discussion with me asking what I thought of their work.  I responded and each student reworked their writing according to my comments.  Some took advantage of the discussion, checking in a second or third time with me.  We also used the wiki to note spelling errors, grammatical issues, and places to inject more detail.  Overall, the wiki made the rewriting and editing phase of the writing process easy. (Please feel free to look at the wiki and click on History on a student page.  This will show you how the students writing changed over time.)

In the future I'd like to see the students do more peer editing.  Collaboration is powerful, and it is so cool to see students helping each other out by correcting spelling or asking questions to clarify detail.  A few students were more active than others and I plan on encouraging this more next time. (Here's a link to Plax helping out Ronnoc. Ronnoc's work is in red and Plax's edits are green. So cool!)

I was thoroughly impressed with how the writing pieces ended up, but I wish there was a way to share all of the fantastic 'seed stories' that are contained within the Woodsters' individual writers notebooks.  Those stories are unpolished, but often are just as impressive, if not more than the work we spent the better part of a month on. 

Please check out our work by clicking Personal Narratives to the left of this page.  This will take you to each of the Woodsters' 'final' (even though writing is NEVER done) drafts.  If you see one you like PLEASE leave a comment.  Your comments inspire us!

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo. I hope you have a fantastic 2009! I can't wait to see you tomorrow!