I figure that most people teach the Writing Cycle as a means to publish a piece of writing, right?  Well, I do, and it’s kind of a big deal in our room.  I start at the very beginning of the year (after I’ve set up our Writer’s Workshop routines and introduced Writer’s Notebooks, that is 🙂 ), teaching my writers about the writing cycle–what it is, why writers do it and how it will help them as we go through the year together.
In the back of our Writer’s Notebooks we have a a place where we keep notes related to mini-lessons I’ve taught.  One of the first things that goes in there is this:

We spend the first writing cycle, then, learning about how to do each part, and end up with a fabulous piece of writing that we’ve worked really hard on!  And so what does that mean next?  We celebrate!

There are many things that our class does to celebrate our writing and “send it out into the world,” but this time, we decided to have a Writing Museum (structured much like our Reading Museum from the beginning of the year) so that we could sample each others’ writing and leave compliments.

So when the “exhibits” were set up and the music started playing, Rm. 202 writers spent the next bit (well actually it was more like 30 minutes or more!) reading the work of others and leaving kind words for our friends.  If only you could have heard how amazingly quiet it was the room during this time!  Writing is important business in our class, and we took this (as we do most things!) very seriously. 🙂

Each person set out their writing piece, along with a compliment sheet for others to write on. 🙂

I love how they’re all sitting with their heads in their hands.  Something about that seems like they’re deep in thought, doing some serious business!

How do you celebrate writing? 🙂