'Stamina Writing' has been developed to ignite and motivate students to write longer and with more stamina.
If you need a simple, systematic and engaging way to get your students eager to write again, this is it! They love the stopwatch timer and their teacher telling them daily that they are getting stronger and wiser!
I suggest you implement it as a 'warm up' style skills mini lesson of between 5 and 15 minutes. It is critical that you are positive and accepting of all attempts by your students in this activity - there are no correct answers and there is NO focus on neatness or correct spelling. It is about building capacity.
The idea is that you implement this as a whole class activity, time them with a timer and encourage them to build minutes each day.
I have provided 5 posters to help you introduce the concept to your class:
1. Strong hands (they won't fall off).
2. Strong minds (do not stop, do not give up)
3. Fast ideas (all ideas count)
4. Have a go spelling (give it a try)
5. Add more power (detail, adjectives, adverbs)
The goal is for students to build the time that they can keep their pencil moving and the ideas flowing. These skills can then be transferred over to their regular writing lessons and program.
This packet also provides an 'activity book' for each daily mini-lesson. There is a cover and 26 pages. Each page has a 3 tasks for students to complete while not stopping their pencil
1. 'pattern' focus - get that pencil moving and build hand strength
2. letter practice - a lowercase and uppercase letter focus to start to warm up and get ready for words3. writing idea prompt - a topic to start listing words and ideas - e.g. "I can..." students then spend the rest of their allocated time recording any idea that comes to their mind without worrying about neatness or spelling
Students record the time that it took them to complete their page as a motivating way to build capacity.
I have provided several extra pages that can be used to provide more space and also as follow-up activities to add 'power' to your students' ideas.
You will find that as the program progresses, students will add power to their original ideas to begin with.
This program will ignite your learners' interest in writing, boost their confidence and help them learn to trust their own ideas for writing.
Click on any of these images to find this new packet in my TpT store (and it's on sale at the moment too)!
