First graders will spend all year working on their writing so that they can become confident and skilled writers on any topic! At the beginning of the year, our main focus has been capital letters to start, periods at the end, and phonetic spelling. Phonetic spelling means using their phonemic awareness skills to listen to each sound in a word, and use a letter or combination of letters to represent each sound. Phonetic spelling does not mean perfect spelling – there are many spelling patterns we have not yet learned! But students apply the patterns they have learned in our spelling routine (so far these include consonants, short vowels, blends, clusters, and digraphs CH and SH) and knowledge of high frequency words to craft their best spelling of the word. As time goes on, their knowledge of spelling patterns and high frequency words will increase, increasing their spelling accuracy at the same time.
Today’s writing was a response to reading the book My Teacher is a Monster! as part of our author study of Peter Brown. In the story, a student named Bobby thinks his teacher is a monster! But one day Bobby bumps into her in the park and begins to see his teacher in a different light. Our writing prompt for today was “What do you think Ms. Ursino does when she’s not at school?”. First graders were asked to write at least three ideas, include interesting details for each, and of course to use their phonetic spelling. They could give their best realistic guess or get creative and write silly things Ms. Ursino might do. The students had wonderful, creative ideas! And some of their guesses were right on the money!
Ideas include:
-Sitting on the couch and eating bonbons
-Buying ingredients at the grocery store to bake a cake
-Adopting pets from the pet shelter
-Going to the park with her mom and dad or her nephew
– Making a giant cake statue to jump out of
-Building a rocketship but struggling to drive it because she is also juggling an elephant while trying to drive!
-Painting portraits
-Going to the swimming pool
-Keeping a secret that she is actually a zombie
-Going to Silver Dollar City to see the cave
-Going to Target
Ms. Ursino got a chuckle out of reading the students’ ideas and was very impressed with their writing skills! They have grown so much in their writing in such a short time!