How Do You Feel?

In our 1st grade writing workshop, we have been begun discussing what good writers write about.

Good Writers Can Write About:

*Things that happen to them

*Things they've done

*Places they've been

*How they feel

How they feel?!?  Oh, no!  This is where EVERYONE is going to write, 'I felt happy when...' or 'I felt sad when...'"  Ugh!  Those boring words...good, happy, sad, bad...  

But then I began thinking, why not combine two great lessons together; writing about feelings AND making better word choice?  PLUS, I have a lot of ESL students in this class with low vocabulary.  How can I make it easier for them to understand words like "disappointed" and "nervous"?  That's when I came up with this chart:

I had all the photos hidden away in a bag as I came to the carpet to teach my whole group lesson.  As I pulled out each picture, the kids helped me read the word.  As one student attached the picture to the chart, the others acted out the feeling.  They did a great job showing me what each "strong feeling" meant.  I could see it all over their faces!  :)

Once the chart was created (over the course of 2 days), I modeled writing and drawing about how I was feeling this morning after being woken up by my dog barking several times throughout the night.  I was SO tired when I woke up this morning!  I just HAD to write about it!

I asked the kids to put their thumb up by their heart once they had an idea of what they were going to write about today.  Then I sent them off to get started.  Those who still needed time to think of an idea, remained on the carpet with me.  I quickly talked to them about how they were feeling when they woke up this morning or how they felt when their mom dropped them off at school today, and off they went to write, as well.

This anchor chart now hangs in their first grade classroom to help them remember not only that they can write about their feelings, but also to remember those "strong" feeling words (and how to spell them).  It especially serves as a great scaffold for my ESL kiddos.

Did It Dots

During our writing workshop time, I mostly use lessons from Lucy Calkins' Units of Study.  But this year, I'm going to start out teaching some of the conventions portion using an idea that originally came from Primarily Writing.  I'm going to take their "did it dot" idea and change it just a bit by using these little stickers that I found at the teacher supply store and Target's dollar spot.

The idea is that as you teach the conventions (spacing, capital letter, punctuation, etc...), you give a "did it dot" for each new thing you see the student using during their independent writing.  For instance, if you've just taught them that you want them to put their name at the top of their paper as soon as they start a new piece, you give a sticker with a happy face on it right beside their name that day.  If you've taught them to stretch out the sounds in a long word that they want to write (turtle talk), and you notice a child finally doing it for the first time, you put a sticker with a turtle drawning on their paper.  Primariy Writing suggests getting the colored dot stickers and printing an abbreviation on each of them to use as did it dots.  I decided to go ahead and make a few of the first ones extra special by getting these stickers.  The happy faces from the Target dollar spot will be for name on your paper.  The sun stickers will be for date on the paper.  The turtles are for "turtle talk".  And I'm still deciding how I'm going to use the star stickers.