Writing Update

Writer's Notebooks

Our morning work each Monday is journaling in our Writer’s Notebook about our weekends or important events in our lives. The children choose a topic of significance to them. Some students have written expert lists of topics they know a lot about, poetry or step by step how to articles. Please take some time each weekend to discuss some possible topics for your child to write about so he/she comes ready to write on Monday. This is a great way for me to hear about their lives and interests. The students enjoy sharing these entries with friends and editing each other's work. 

Writing Celebration

The students have worked diligently on publishing their personal narrative writing pieces. We discussed a personal narrative as a “memory” or “snapshot” of an event in our lives. We made webs of our memories in our Writer’s Notebook and shared them with our talk partners. We then chose the one we wanted to write about and made a mind map of our ideas. We looked at the who (characters), when, where (setting) and what (plot) of our stories/experiences and then focused on a powerful beginning and ending. Our class had a wonderful writing celebration this week as a culmination of our hard work. This is a time where our classmates read our writing pieces and we share comments with each other.

Lastly, we made a toast to good writing!

Buzzing About Bees

We have begun to study bees and the important part they play in the pollination of our plants. We started with “What do we Know About Bees and “What are we Wondering About Bees”. This gave us a good basis to work from and see how much prior knowledge we possessed. I then had the students illustrate what they think a bee looks like on half a sheet of paper. At the end of our unit, the students will be asked to draw another picture of a bee and include all that they learned. We can then put the two sketches together and visually assess how much information was learned. 

We observed real bees this past week and identified the different parts of the bee’s body. Then we made bee sticks to pollinate our plants. It is really neat because you can actually see the pollen stick to the bee’s body. We have read many books on Honeybees. Ask your child about some of the interesting facts we learned. We will observe the changes in our flowers as we cross-pollinate and you may even be able to see the pods on our plants.