The Color Walk

Today we took a color walk.

During writing time we have been reading the book called a Writer's Notebook by Ralph Fletcher.

I love reading this book to the class.  It describes how Fletcher uses his notebook as a tool to help his writing.  In the first few pages of the book he writes the line, "If you dig it, they will come."  I love this line and not just for the Field of Dreams"ish" quality of the line.  The idea refers to Fletcher digging a hole in his father's yard that then gets filled with amazing creatures.  "If you dig it, they will come."  

I have tried to tell the class if you write it they will come.  What will come?  Amazing little nuggets of writing.  I think Fletcher is correct, our notebooks are going to be filled with amazing things.  When you give students TIME to write they will amaze you.

Fletcher also talks about living a writerly life.  This was our reason for the color walk.  A writer needs to notice things and write them down.  So today we picked a color and wrote it down.  Then we walked around the school and searched for that color.  Students wrote down quick phrases to describe what they were finding and of course they were amazing because...if you dig it they will come.

I do have to admit the color walk we took today was the hottest color walk I have ever taken, but the class still did an awesome job.  You can find this color walk in the writer's notebook.

We also took some more time to talk about text-to-text connections today.  Instead of a normal text, we looked at some amazing pieces of art.

These amazing paintings were the texts that we used today to think about text-to-text connections.  I was surprised at all the different things the classes were able to say that these paintings had in common. I guess I did not realize how artsy things were going to get in my room with a color walk and analyzing some Edward Hopper paintings, but I really enjoyed the day despite the heat.