Bouncing Easter Bunnies

This month we spent time in readers work shop reading some children's classics like Little Red Riding Hood and The Tale of Peter Rabbit. We extended our lesson by creating bunny masks and role played as bunnies for math. To introduce the children to meters versus centimeters, the students put on there bunny masks and had a bunny hopping contest. Each student was given a meter string where they had to measure their hop. Some bunnies hopped less than a meter, and a few, more than a meter!

bookPress

This week we are featuring Grade 1 student Jelani Matthews. Jelani loves our daily writers workshop! He's always filled with creative ideas and writes with style and voice. He took his passion for writing home, and created an ebook on his ipad using an app called bookPress. He typed his story, and found and saved pictures from the Internet, and then inserted his images into his ebook. He then published his book on the website and printed a copy to bring to class. Visit our Interactive Links page to download this productive online activity for your child.

Procedural Writing

We started our second term off with some creative procedural writing. First term students wrote about their lives, then they created stories with fictional characters, and now they are writing to teach. The kids are loving this unit! To help the students think of topics to write about, each student created a list of things they were good at at school, and then for homework, created a list of things they were good at in their homes. After picking a topic students just started writing to teach!

Many of the mini-lessons I use for writer's workshop are based of off Lucy Calkins Grade 1, Curricular Plan For the Writing Workshop. This writing curriculum is much cheaper than the $300 units of study from the past. Now you can buy a downloadable version for your specific grade for only $10, save it on your thumb drive and take it to Kinkos to be printed and bound!


To teach specific word choice I brought in a toaster and had the students give me directions on how to make toast. They definitely started using transition words after this demonstration :) We also did a mini-lesson on "warning words".  I used a cook book filled with warning words, as a read aloud during the mini-lesson. Then students went back and worked with their writing partners to add and revise. We will be wrapping up this unit next week with a writing celebration with our reception little buddies.

How To Writing Template