Writing with no pencils

I told my class to put away their pencils because we were going to start writing time.  As you can imagine, I got a lot of strange looks!  The point of my lesson was that sometime writers need to think things through before they start putting their ideas on paper.  We then broke up into small groups to brainstorm how first grade and second grade are alike and different.  We got back together and listed some of the ideas on the board using an adapted Venn diagram (square's tend to work better than circles for us).  We'll continue with this topic for the next few days.