Since August we have completed several units in Writers' Workshop. We launched our independent writing program in August by drawing pictures of events from our lives, including both those at school and at home. We used storytelling and details in our pictures to communicate our ideas. Next we moved to adding labels to our pictures and finally a putting the labels into a sentence.
Our second writing unit focused on making lists of things that went together, such as colors and pets. Our third unit involved taking our lists and turning them into booklets using sentences with patterns, such as "I see the cat. I see the dog, etc."
For the first part of November we were busy writing poems using themes around colors, animals, Thanksgiving, and other topics that interested the children.
Up until now we have talked about how to put your ideas into your words, how to use picture clues to reinforce your writing, and to work neatly. We have learned to be brave spellers to include challenging words to tell our stories and to spell the 30 sight words correctly that we have added to our Word Wall.
Today we began our fifth writing unit, Small Moments. This unit is similar to the Launching Unit we began in August, but with increased expectations. This morning we reviewed how to write a story in Writers' Workshop. Then I demonstrated an example by drawing a picture and writing a sentence about the math lesson we had early this morning. The children quickly chose topics and went off to write independently for 20 minutes. What a wonderful job our writers did! Great stories! Great detail in the pictures! Neat work! Everyone read their stories with partners and was very proud of their work. Jake was especially eager to read his story to the class with the document camera. Tomorrow the class will learn how to take one small event from their lives and how to turn it into a three page story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our class is ready for this challenge! Awesome work! In addition, we will focus on having spaces between our words and including periods, question marks, and exclamation marks at the end of each sentence. The Small Moments unit will be great fun with much learning going on. It will continue through the end of December.
