Now that we are halfway through the school year and we have been working on writing skills for a while, we are going to more consistently use writing rubrics to evaluate student writing. Rubrics will be shared and explained and some student-friendly rubrics may be implemented. Shaker Lane is using the writing rubrics for grade 2-3 from Keys to Writing. If you are interested in getting a sneak peek at them, I will post the links below. Please notes, these will not link to websites; instead the rubric will automatically download to your computer. As many of us discussed at the December conferences, as a class we are working on repeating words from the question or prompt at the beginning of our answers/response. That ensures we start with a complete sentence, fully explain ourselves, and would help us write a clear, interesting topic sentence (called a "lead" in the rubric). We have also begun introducing and working on closing sentences or "conclusions"