Celebrating PUBLICation!!

This past week, my fourth graders celebrated the PUBLICation of their first writing products -- their mystery narratives.  It was such an exciting day, both for my student writers to see the fruits of their labors and for me to see the fruits of mine.

Publication is the final stage of the writing process.  It is the time where we take all of our hard work and make it PUBLIC, hence the 'public' in 'publication.'  This can be a risky time.  No one wants to put their hard work out there to bear criticism.  Yet if it's done right, it can be a time of great affirmation and celebration -- and also a great motivation to keep writing!

So this week, I'm going to share this motivation through the fabulous Joanne at Head Over Heels for Teaching's weekly linky party, Spark Student Motivation.

My 4th grade students have been working on their Mystery Narratives for the past three weeks.  We went through all of the stages of the writing process, but really focused most of our energy on revision.  When we were done and published, we celebrated by having a Publishing Party where we were able to read each other's books and leave "Raves from Readers" with our feedback.

Each student's mystery was bound into a book.

Students could visit the three 4th grade classrooms to Read & Rave about their fellow student writers' books.  Everyone had to Read & Rave about four books, but most students read more.  (Before we did this, we had a brief mini-lesson on how to leave positive feedback and discussed some sentence starters just to make sure we were all on the same page.)

It was SO COOL that even other staff members stopped by to Read & Rave! (I'll admit that students were MOST excited if a teacher had commented on their story.  I overheard one boy say "The librarian raved about my book.  It's like I'm a REAL AUTHOR now!!"  Ahhh....music to my ears!!  :)

After about 30 minutes, students returned to their home classroom to read their Raves and to have some punch and cookies.  As a teacher, this was one of the most exciting parts of the celebration because I could see the faces light up on the faces of all the students as they read the compliments on their writing.

So if you really want to MOTIVATE your student writers, give them a real audience and CELEBRATE their efforts!  Such fun!!

Speaking of fun, I hope you will come back tomorrow for my weekly linky party, A Peek at My Week, to let us in on some fun things you have planned for next week!  See you then!!