
Saturday, December 31
Status of the Class for Writer's Workshop

Saturday, November 5
Ideas - The HEART of Writing
My firsties have SO much fun writing personal narratives during Writer's Workshop. In order to help my writers see themselves as writers that see stories everywhere in their lives, I invest extra time in building their mindset around choosing topics to write about. Writers Workshop is one of my favorite things to teach and I sharing teaching tips for teaching writing.
While launching writers workshop and throughout the school year, it helps all children to view their lives from a writers lens. This is true for writing personal narratives, poetry, friendly letters, and any unit of study for writing. For some writers this takes longer, so it's important to keep marinating in idea building all year long.
We build writing ideas in many ways in my first grade classroom, mostly in these ways.
- Orally tell the beginning, middle and end of stories about what has happened in our lives that very day (such as recess, lunch time, gym class, a fire drill, or waking up that morning), as well as in the past (such as a place they've been to and loved, a time they got hurt, the first time they did something that was hard, a time they've been afraid, etc).
- I post the front side of our Writer's Details chart on the big tv and we refer to it to ask questions about each others' orally shared stories. Questions like, "Who was with you?" and "When did this happen?" and "How did you feel?" and "What did you decide?"
Once your writers are ORALLY primed to tell stories, picking up a pencil and writing them down is SO.MUCH.EASIER. Especially if you've normalized how to sound stretch unknown words and using tools for checking sight words, letter formation or including more details. Once a writer can make a really good movie in their mind about a time they did something or something happened to them - where they can picture the beginning, the middle and the end - picking up the pencil and writing their personal narratives should feel easy, not hard.
When writing feels easy and their approximations are celebrated and honored, your writers want to do more and more! This leads to a higher volume of writing, which builds automaticity, writing skills and FUN.
It's even EASIER when you observe your writers writing and see what is slowing them down....it might be fear of spelling a word wrong or how a letter looks or spending time deciding what word should come next or not knowing letter sounds automatically.
Once you diagnose the reason(s) why various writers are stuck and why they aren't producing/finishing work during the time you're giving them, you can teach whole and small group strategy lessons around those areas.
Can you tell I'm passionate about teaching writing? I love, love, love it!
Happy Writing!

Saturday, July 2
Friendly Letter Writing
Even though many writing curricula no longer include a unit on writing friendly letters, I find that spending a couple weeks on a friendly letter unit is a fabulous way to build student understanding about author's purpose and to practice writing conventions like capitalization and punctuation. Plus, I also love that writing a letter is typically not intimidating to writers just beginning to develop their writing confidence.
Saturday, June 25
Helping Readers Read Carefully Across Words
7 Instructional Tips to help Readers Look Closely Across Words
Tip 1
Tip 2
Tip 3
Tip 4
Tip 5
Tip 7
My class is always crazy about it when I get out the laser pointer during shared reading, reciting sight words on our class word wall or counting on our number line. With the word wall and number line counting, I encourage them to be watching very carefully because I change directions...sometimes we count up and then count back or sometimes we'll read all the words under a letter top to bottom or sometimes one word from each of the letters going A to Z.Leave a comment below with your favorite tip for helping readers look closely across words!