"What happens on a daily basis in the workshop is always part of something bigger than that one day...

 "Any lesson that we teach, any conference that we have, has both a history and a future in the life of the workshop"

"Our units of study create important teaching time lines across the year"

 Units of Study

I agree that as teachers we need to have planned units of study for the year. The whole year's writing workshop doesn't need to be planned, but at least an outline of what you plan to do and for how long even if you include blank weeks for "class selected" units.

In regard to "planning" units in the writing workshop it makes me excited that you aren't suppose to plan every single thing out except for maybe the focus lesson. I like the flexibility of the writing workshop and the room it gives students to move about where there aren't any wrong answers or things to study. 

I also like that in addition to planning for specific units of study that Katie Wood Ray realizes that as we conference and look over our students work that we might find specific areas that students need help in and that we can take the time to teach these "as-needed" focus lesson. For example teaching about adjectives.

I thought the questions that Katie Wood Ray suggested that we think about for assisting in selecting our units of study, we very helpful. I appreciated her suggestion of have a unit of study on an aspect of writing that I have a strength. If I had to pick this now I definitely would pick my unit on "response to literature" and the different ways to respond. This unit would be good to implement in the beginning of the year seeing and how many lesson might involve some sort of responding to literature. I also liked Katie's idea of having two opposing grade (5th and 1st) have a literary study together in a co-genre study. I believe this would be very beneficial to both grades in having the students see how they both develop and learn. 

Lastly I liked her suggestion about have a genre study of testing. I am in 5th grade this semester and they had to take the 5th grade writing test a few weeks ago and I wondered how I would instruct my future students in how to prepare for the test. However Katie's suggestion is a great idea. To implement a writing workshop about teaching the difference between testing curriculum and writing curriculum would be beneficial. Also teaching students strategies and ways to take the writing test, I believe it would help ease their nerves.

The units of study chapter was very beneficial to me. At first I thought that the writing workshop just consisted of creating writing samples of different genres, but now I know it can be extended to more broad "units of study."