Going on a Pignic!

Happy Friday, ya'll! I don't know about you guys, but it's been a LONG week! I don't think I ever recovered from parent-teacher conferences last week. Anywho, I wanted to share a little project my kiddos did with some of our Kindergarden friends!

*Prologue*
Jelly Bean, our guinea pig, and Henry, the bunny who lives in one of the K classrooms are pretty much BFF's. They write letters to one another on a regular basis. Our kids LOVE writing letters back and forth! The K teacher and I had been joking about having the 2 of them go on a picnic with the classes, then she stumbled upon the cutest little alphabet book... Pignic!

SO. Since it's an alphabet book, I read a few similar books to my kiddos, then grouped them to brainstorm names and words that started with each letter of the alphabet.

After my kiddos came up with LOADS of words for each letter, we wrote sentences as a group. We wrote a few sentences each day, and had so much fun writing them! Yesterday, we finally got to go on our PIGNIC! The K teacher made little Pignic headbands for each of the kids (and she made one for Henry, too!) They were beyond excited to go visit their friends in K!

Jelly Bean and Henry... BFF's 4 life!

Once I read the book to the kids, we paired them off to illustrate the sentences my kids had written. My little firsties were SO pumped to be big buddies to their little K friends! I told them that they should let their friends do most of the work, and just be there to help them if they get stuck. Even my low kids were thrilled to be helpers..

We have to go to school on Monday next week. Jusssssssst Monday. Do you have school next week?

Here Write Now

Sorry. My wife and I went to see Ghost The Musical a few weeks ago, which was literally the most comically terrible thing I've ever seen, and the song "Here right now" has been stuck in my head. I was feeling witty. Hence, Here Write Now. Look at me go.

ANYWHO. I've really been thinking about how I teach writing in my class lately. In talking to the second grade teachers in my building, I didn't feel that we were doing a great job preparing our students to write in second grade. As soon as our students get to second grade, they are expected to respond to writing each week, in a typical "opening sentence, 3 details, closing sentence" format. I did NONE of this with my kids, because I was way more focused on writing in complete sentences, making sure that the capital letters ended up in the right place, and trying to get them to express personal feeling through their writing. SO, I decided to start throwing in SIMPLE writing prompts to get them in the habit of writing 5 sentences around a single topic. The first few times I've done it, I have heavily guided my students through the pre-writing process.

My pre-writing page is nothing fancy, but I really wanted to provide my students with a way to organize their ideas.

For our first try, I had my kiddos simply think of 3 reasons why they love Thanksgiving. Our opening and closing sentences were all very similar... Things like "Thanksgiving is the best holiday" or "I really love Thanksgiving" or "I can't wait for Thanksgiving" etc... (The turkeys are sight word turkeys that I made last year... I blogged about them HERE.)

We wrapped up reading The Big Circle in Reading Street last week, so on Friday, I had the kiddos think of 3 reasons they would want a dinosaur as a pet. They had SO much fun with this writing project, and even MORE fun making the dinosaurs to match! The dinosaur pattern is FREE on TpT by the fantastic Ms. Leslie Ann at Life in First Grade! Love her stuff.

Do you have any tricks for getting your firsties ready for independent writing prompts?

Daily 5 - Work on Writing

Heyo! I finally remembered to take some pictures today, so I wanted to share a little more about my journey into the land of the Daily 5!

My kids are independent on Read To Self. It took many hours of model/practice/repeat, but we got there. I only took them as high as 20 minutes because my reading groups are never longer than that. Today, I told each reading group where I wanted them to go. Since I have 4 groups, I had one with me, one with my aide, one at Read To Self, and one group trying their first attempt at an all-out Word Work extravaganza. I've been gradually introducing each activity at my Word Work center. Right now, I'm keeping it simple with: magnetic letters, letter tiles, wiki stix, and letter stamps. They knew to choose one and keep it the whole time. With the exception of 2 little cherubs who were at the back of the room spelling their names with magnetic letters, everyone handled this remarkable well for their first attempt.

This afternoon, I tried 20 minutes of Work on Writing. I've been slowly introducing various activities they can do during this time. I use Lori Rosenberg's I Can Write A...Writing Menu, which I highly recommend if you're setting up a writing center! It's filled with gazillions of options for your kiddos to write. Right now, I've only introduced: letter, postcard, how-to, list, sticker story, and scribble story, which is a huge hit. However... If I read one more scribble story where they turn the scribble into a roller coaster or a mountain, I'll scream.

Anywho, here's what my Work on Writing station has shaped up to be. I got the cart from Big Lots on sale for $25 well spent. Basically, I made a drawer for each option they can choose. They know they can choose ONE of these during each Work On Writing, then they must journal. Some chose to only journal, which made my heart smile.

I decided that the top drawer was going to be their spot to turn in finished writing. There's also a mailbox (which I forgot to take a picture of) that they can mail letters and postcards to friends in the room. In order to turn in work, the students must highlight their name on their paper, mostly because some of the worksheets don't have spaces for names, so they always forget to squeeze it in.

Here's a peek at my writing focus board. The posters about what they can write all came in the writing menu pack. I also plopped up a few of my "I Can" Statements for things we're focusing on in writer's workshop.

I also put our anchor chart that we created about things to write about. The pencil about what do writers write came from The Teacher Wife.

Tomorrow, we're going to start discussing Listen To Reading behaviors by listening to the story from our anthology as a group... we'll see how that goes!! Cross your fingers.

Spooky Writing

Writing is one of the things that I look forward to most each day... I'd been thinking of some ways to get in a little Halloween writing, and finally came up with the perfect idea. The other day, we read In a Dark, Dark Wood by David. A Carter. I had it on the board behind me during reading groups, and kept hinting at how scary it was. Every once in a while, I'd open the book and scream then slam it shut. Needless to say, those little first graders were ready to eat right out of my hand! When we finally read the book, they were ready to jump every time I turned the page! For those who don't know me, I'm slightly very theatrical. I made it seem as if something was going to jump out every time I turned the page. When we finally reached the end of the story, and the ghost popped out of the book, they just about died. They've been bugging me every day since to read it again. I love that even the simplest of stories can keep them SO excited! When we finished up, I had the students close their eyes and think about something that might scare them if they were walking through the woods on a dark, dark night. We talked a lot about descriptive language, and how we could help the reader to really picture these creatures in their mind. Then I set them free... They came up with the coolest things! Some went very traditional, and others went WAY beyond!

After Halloween, I'm planning on taking them down to make a book for our classroom library. Do you have any fun Halloween writing ideas? Please share if you do :-) Have a good night!