January 19th, 2013

Week Two back from break and our students had a fun and productive week.  We love this time of year because the kids are so focused and the distractions of the past months are gone.  Here are a few of our favorite things from this week.

Our new focus in writing has been based on Katie Woodray's book, Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom. It is a wonderful read. So much in fact, our books are marked with notes and dog-eared pages because we reference them constantly. Her big idea is students can use authors as models for their writing structure and ways with words. So we decided to use Cynthia Rylant's book, In November to use her writing structure and ways with words in our own writing. We read this book in November, but this time we asked the students to "read like writers" to see what they noticed about her writing. They noticed she used a repeated line, they noticed she organized the different vignettes by different subjects, and they noticed she used similes, sense words, and personification. We were truly impressed because this was only our second go at reading like a writer.

After taking the students to our outdoor classroom to brainstorm the happenings in January, we came back in and jumped write into writing. Here is an example of one student's writing project. Please excuse any typos, we did our best to make sure everyone's writing was ready for publication.

If you're interested in trying this writing lesson, our full lesson plan, including frames for the months of the year, will be posted for $1.00 on our Teachers pay Teachers store tomorrow. (Teachers Pay Teachers)  We are sorry, but the file is too big to be free according to TpT.  This file contains two writing frames that can be used for each month of the year.  We plan on having a free In January lesson plan and frame as soon as possible.  Right now we cannot upload it because there is a glitch in the system and we are waiting for an answer as to how to fix it.  However, we were able to upload it to google docs.  If you click on the side pinterest button it will take you to our boards.  You can click on the picture and it will take you right to google docs.  We hope you find it useful.

Two Bad Ants by Chris Van Allsburg was the perfect story to hook our students into making inferences during our shared reading. They loved the art/writing project that we did after reading, even though it pushed them to their limits. Our shared reading lesson took two days because not only did the students have to infer where the ants were, they had to provide evidence from the text, pictures, and their background knowledge. After reading, students recreated a scene from the story, and inferred what the ants were thinking or feeling. For our written response, we analyzed all of the events in the story and came up with the theme, which the students then had to write about.

This lesson is also on our Teachers Pay Teachers store. The only difference is that we focused on the theme for our written response rather than writing about the setting. Here is the direct link:  Teachers Pay Teachers

We look forward to sharing more of our lesson plans with you next week. We hope to get new ideas from you, too! We would love for you to comment below.