In the spring, one of the hardest parts of teaching online was teaching writing. I knew I had to do better for my first graders this fall. In the classroom, I felt like I had a grip on teaching first graders how to write a good paragraph. But teaching online is a different story.
We are just getting started with our second trimester and I can honestly say that writing has gone a lot smoother this fall. In our district, we use Wonders for our Language Arts series. While I like some of their writing prompts because they are responding to the stories we read, I feel like it's missing direct instruction on the three genres we need to teach: personal narrative, informational, and opinion.
Here's how I've broken up my week to make sure I'm covering not only the response to literature (from Wonders), but also the 3 genres mentioned earlier. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I use the prompt from the teachers edition. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I assign either a personal narrative or informational writing. Partway through this trimester, we'll start learning about opinion writing. Fridays are for revisiting and editing our writing from the week.
Since I'm a first grade teacher, I was able to convince my principal to allow us to pass our journals during the first few weeks of school. The journals included pages for the writing prompts. We also sent home about 20 writing pages for the genre writing. We had a couple reasons for keeping the pages separate from the journals. First, the journals would've been too thick to staple if we included both the writing prompts and the additional pages for genre writing. Second, we wanted the students to know that the journals were in response to literature and the writing pages were for personal narratives, informational, and opinion.
During our Language Arts block, we always start the writing together. We discuss the writing prompt and decide on a good introductory sentence. In first trimester, we did a lot of it together. Now that we're in second trimester, we talk about ideas for the our supporting sentences and the conclusion, but the students write them individually. Here are some examples of my first graders writing. It's not the best picture since it was submitted from home. This is Unit 2 Week 5 Day 1. You can see he drew 3 places they went on their walk and then used the text to write about where they went.
Here are some examples of personal narrative writing and informational writing. At the beginning of the year, we only did personal narratives on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Around mid-October, they had mastered personal narratives, so we added informational writing.
We usually reserve Fridays for editing. Students are asked to reread all of their writings for the week and then to take one of their writing samples and improve it. They can improve it by adding detail sentences, looking up words to see if they spelled them correctly, or just rewording sentences to make them more clear. This has proven to be a really effective way of encouraging students to revisit their writing.
For a free copy of our this writing paper, please visit my TPT store.
Have a great week!
Kimberly
