Writing Portfolios

On Thursday my school is hosting an Open House for parents and students to come in and take a peek inside their child’s classroom and check out what has been going on in school. I love teaching writing and helping students become more confident and skilled at putting their thoughts onto paper. Since the beginning of the year I have been saving my students writing and accumulating it in a writing portfolio. I enjoyed reading and rereading my students writing and thinking about how they have grown as a writer.

Today my students were given their folders and had the opportunity to reread their work and choose three of their favorite pieces. I gave them each three post-it notes and asked them to order the top three pieces. I also asked them to include a note as to why they chose those pieces. They had to think about their writing and find what they liked about it. If they wanted to leave all their writing in the folder for their parents to see, they could, or only leave in their top three pieces. Either way, all of their writing would be given back to them at the end of the year in the folder. What a wonderful remembrance this would create!  Inside of their folder they also had an unfinished piece of writing, a fractured fairy tale. I explained to them that writers often have several pieces of writing going at the same time, and an unfinished piece. I told them that perhaps they would want to finish this story before the end of the year, and a few students shared with me that they wanted to do just that.

When my students received their folders there was lots of reading, talking, and sharing in the room. One student asked if he could award each of his pieces of writing with a post-it note. Another student marked her number one piece of writing as “My very first essay.” Still there were others who pulled out pieces that were funny and used figurative language creatively, such as metaphors and onomatopoeia. Some students found pieces of writing that were very long, and others noticed some pieces were particularly short and they realized they had been stumped at the time. There was a feeling in the room of being proud of what they had accomplished, and they also realized how much they had improved in writing since the beginning of the year.

I have been working on collecting these pieces of writing since the beginning of the year. To me each one is precious and represents the child who created it. I shared with my students that I hope that they continue to grow their love and skills of writing into fourth grade and beyond; and one day they can look back at the portfolio they created in the third grade and realize what a gift their writing was for all of us.