This past week at University, we worked one on one with the fourth grade students for their Writing Workshop. This was great! Although the room was a little crowded, we got to see what this was like in an actual elementary classroom. We were able to also see how creative some of the students could be, and ask questions of the teacher facilitating this. It was wonderful to hear that the children were not corrected on spelling or grammar when writing in these notebooks. These were used purely for the enjoyment and creativity of writing, which I feel makes them really enjoy it. Pushing the students to brainstorm many different ideas is an important aspect of this workshop, because it allows the students to expand their thinking a little bit, without any restrictions. It also allows them to maybe go back and use some of the ideas that they came up with earlier, but chose not to expand on. It was good to see the students excited about writing, and having fun with creating stories.

In class on Wednesday, while working with the newspaper genres and creating our own based on our MGRP, I got some really good ideas for my own project! It was awesome to see what everyone came up with. It allowed me to see the term 'genre' in a more concrete way, because I was actually sort of struggling with what five I would do. Now that I have more ideas, I can use those and apply them to my topic. It was great!