Writing

We are learning how to become writers. We use the 6 Traits of Writing and Lucy Caulkin's Primary Units of Study. Each day we gather together to learn, practice, and model new writing skills and strategies. Then we get our writing tools and get to work creating wonderful stories! At the end of each unit, we hold a special writing celebration.

Unit 1: Launching the Writing Workshop - In this unit, we learned what to do during our writing workshop time. Our writing time is one hour long and we do lots of things during this time. We meet together to listen to a story that serves as a model for what we'll be working on that day, then talk about what we'll be doing as writers when we work on our own. We pick up our writing tools, get our writing folders, and work on our writing pieces. We celebrated our writing at the end of the unit with our classmates. Here are our celebration pieces from our first unit.

Unit 2: Small Moments - Personal Narratives - In this unit, we learned to focus in on a small moment of our lives and to stay in that moment from beginning to end. We learned to sketch, rather than draw our illustrations. We began to use four-page books for our pieces. Each first grader had a writing partner to share ideas with and at the end of the unit, to revise and edit their books. They copied their final stories into a new book and we invited the fourth graders in to celebrate their hard work. Here are our celebration pieces from our second unit.