San Jose 3/7 & Cupertino 3/12
K/1 Students had another lesson on writing complete sentences with the 5 Ws. I thought it was a good one to go over twice, especially since I was out sick and didn’t get to see how well they absorbed the concept. They did very well in discussion, although the amount of writing was hard for the youngest Kinders. That’s okay – just talking about it out loud and writing some words down is giving them the idea of a sentence with detail. For the older 1st graders, it was just about right. They all enjoyed learning to draw the elephant and adding their own features and scenery. A few children also made sentences with my plastic sentence tiles (they have words on them and are color-coded by part of speech) or dramatized stories with plastic animals. All students continue to journal each week. We are going to start talking more about story writing, especially plot, in the weeks before the break.
2/3 Students’ lesson was on paragraph writing again, this time with a regular narrative instead of a how-to. They filled in a story template called, “Spiders in the Bedroom,” in which they described the spider, the boy’s reaction to finding the spider, and what he did about it. They were also asked to illustrate those three parts of the story. This type of activity gives them practice with how a paragraph flows from the opening sentence, transitions through the steps of a process or story, and then to the ending. With the template, the student isn’t overwhelmed by also having to come up with the whole story, but can focus just on the paragraph structure until it feels comfortable. This group is also enjoying dramatizing stories and using picture prompts and topic sentence prompts to get ideas for their writing. All students continue to journal each week. We are going to start talking more about story writing, especially plot, in the weeks before the break.
