Oregon Writing Project - Workshop

Yesterday I attended a fantastic workshop at the Willamette University School of Education! The workshop was called "Old Dogs, New Tricks" and highlighted some new and interesting, as well as best practice methods for teaching writing to a variety of students. Some of the ideas highlighted included:

-using interesting visual or textual writing prompts to get your students excited about language
-the importance of getting students to both understand the necessity for and the art of writing a successful summary
-encouraging students to expand their vocabulary by giving them limits in the # of words that they can use (thus enlisting them to choose their words very carefully)

Topics of discussion ranged from writing practices that would be especially applicable to ELL students to inspirational ideas that would work for most students... Not only did I learn a lot, but it was also a nice time for me, as busy as I have been, to have for my own personal enrichment... Not required, but desirable and fun. In one of the exercises that I did with Steve Jones, we wrote "cumulative sentences" or one-sentence stories (from a simple prompt "The wolf ate...") this is what I came up with:

A scraggly, tired-looking creature, (which may have once been a healthy wolf, though it was now hard to see past the patchy fur stretched over bones), sat hunched over his prey in the dusky forest clearing; he chewed with apprehension as his eyes moved frantically from his meager meal to the dark spaces between the trees that surrounded him.

I left the workshop with renewed inspiration.