Mrs. Hatem: Third Grade
I love graphic organizers and my students do too! :) I use the "OREO" Graphic Organizer when we are writing a persuasive or opinion piece.
I often refer back to the training - lead with your 2nd best reason, bury your weakest reason and end with you STRONGEST reason! 
Mrs. Gedeon: Third Grade
One of the biggest changes I've implemented from the workshop was making all of my opinion writing based on text and not just their own thoughts. This is how the AIR is modeled and it has helped my students use facts to support their opinions.
Mrs. Bethel: K-2 Intervention Specialist
While the 5th grade students in my LLI group read, they often come across words they don't know. Rather than just skipping them and losing meaning, I have the students stop reading and write them on our white board with the page number. We discuss the meaning and then after all students have finished the chapter we go back through the words and see if we can use context clues to determine the meaning. Not all students miss the same words and so they help each other with the meaning. If we can't find the meaning in the text, we look the word up. Afterward, we use these words for our word wall. I was surprised at how many words the students didn't know and yet they keep on going!!! The students have better comprehension of what they are reading when they know what all of the words mean.
Mrs. Howard: Fifth Grade Intervention Specialist
Mrs. Newman and I use graphic organizers, peer editing questions, and citing the text for evidence.
Mrs. Compston: Third Grade
Because so many kiddos come to 3rd grade with the "first, next, then" schema already implanted VERY well, it is a good time to help them start varying their transitions. So I have used the Smekens' Purposeful Transitions (sign) sheet to help the kiddos come up with some better choices. Of course, the organization and purpose for writing really dictates the transition words they use. So we have to talk about the different purposes for writing as well. I think the purposeful transitions page has been helpful for the third graders as they move into different types of writing. Overall, I see and hear less "first, next, then" than I did at the start of the year.
Mrs. Starner: Fourth and Fifth Grade Science
?I recently had the students in my room create a brochure about taking a tour of the solar system. They really enjoy creative writing, and this was a great way for them to organize their thinking. I remember during the PD over the summer that she said making brochures is a good way to integrate science with writing, and it works for me!
Mrs. Newman: Fifth Grade Language Arts
We used a graphic organizer called I Know About at the beginning of the quarter so that when it was time to do another persuasive lesson, the students already had a list of items they could talk about.
Mrs. Ortiz: Kindergarten
We have been working on punctuation. We use the hand signals & motions for period, question mark, & exclamation point. The students know exactly what they mean & use these often themselves. We look at a variety of sentences & decide on the correct punctuation. We then sort sentences according to the correct punctuation mark and glue them accordingly onto a chart.
Mrs. Holman: Fourth and Fifth Social Studies
I use the calendar thought process she gave us about not always using a large project to give the grade. I now break up certain concepts into smaller pieces for grades and then later we use those smaller pieces to create a larger project. Example would be our letters to King George III. We completely constructed the letters throughout the topic doing a variety of different activities in our interactive notebooks and then used those activities to formulate the letter.
Mrs. Cannon: Literacy Coach
Often times students in LLI are frustrated by the writing process, so I have been using listing as a way to start.
Students can focus more on their ideas as we list responses. Once we have concluded our listing, we then go back and talk about how to turn those ideas into complete sentences.
It isn't fancy, but it seems to help!
Miss Cannon: First Grade
We have been working on opinion writing in first grade. This year I taught the students to hold off on saying their opinions. First, we brainstorm a list of reasons for each choice. Next, they think about the reasons to help determine their opinions. This has helped students tell about their own opinions rather than just choosing what their friends pick. I graded an opinion writing piece yesterday and the students did better than they had in the past.
Mrs. Harley: Kindergarten
As part of our morning journal routine we use an interactive program that allows us to practice making new words. Currently, we are practicing changing the middle sounds of cvc words then using a few of the words in a sentence. Students practice record these words on journal paper.
Mrs. McCoy: First Grade
From the Smekens workshop I have incorporated different labeling activities (for the beginning of the year), practiced making lists, and used graphic organizers to make the writing process a little smoother!
Mrs. Lotozo: Title One
For pre-writing I have used the tabletop and legs idea to show topic sentence and supporting details. I liked this idea because students can visualize what they need to accomplish and it made it easier for them to achieve an effective writing piece. I have also used the Oreo method for persuasive writing. I like the idea of adding evidence to the reasons.
Miss Schinittke: Third Grade Intervention Specialist