6 Traits/VOICES and CAFE/FACE

Summer is nearing an end!

A couple days ago I went to school to help set up the annual Rummage Sale. Wow! SO MUCH STUFF! I ended up buying a few books, including an extra copy of one of my favorite kids books, The Fat Cat.

One of my fellow elementary teachers was helping too, and we had the chance to meet up with the temporary administrator to get an update on what we might be teaching next month. As of right now, if nothing extraordinary happens, I'm teaching...

*drumroll*

3rd grade!

I am so excited!

I'm already starting to hone in on ideas for what I want to do with this grade level. I mentioned before that I would like to incorporate some of CAFE for reading because it seems like a great way to let children know expectations, encourage self-monitoring, and provide strategies to improve.

But now I just discovered (amazing the things you can discover through teacher blogs!) the 6+1 writing traits! It's like CAFE but for writing, and not by the 2 Sisters.

Oooh, oooh, and the fun thing is CAFE can be rewritten into the acronym FACE and the 6 traits can make the acronym VOICES. (Or maybe I'll just stick with "CAFE" and the "6 Traits".)

So what FACE and VOICES does is create categories for what students should achieve in reading and writing.

READING
F - fluency
A - accuracy
C - comprehension
E - expand vocabulary

WRITING
V - voice
O - organization
I - ideas
C - conventions
E - excellent word choice
S - sentence fluency

The Plattsbugh City School District has provided a very helpful, free pdf overview of the 6+1 Traits of Writing that I'm going to use, though Amazon has a comprehensive book by Ruth Culham, as well as one by her on how to use picture books to teach the 6 traits.

I also really like this pinned idea of displaying the 6 Traits/VOICES:

My hope is that displaying these categories will give us focus and help us more clearly work towards improvement. And it will give me categories in which to insert my teaching! Today we're talking about synonyms and antonyms. Knowing synonyms and antonyms will help you with your WORD CHOICE when writing and may help you EXPAND YOUR VOCABULARY in reading.

See? Oh, this is going to be so wonderful! *glee*

I'm just a little optimistic, can you tell?

Meanwhile, yesterday I stopped by the local library and visited their used book store. I came home with several books, but am especially excited about these two:

And that's that for now!