Curious Firsties: Whole Lot of Research Going on.... Part 2 and a Freebie!

Life... it's a funny thing. It tends to get in the way a tad. So this post is a long time coming, but I did rotate the pictures so you can see some of our writing.

I left you with a few pictures of the jeeps and what our hallway looked like. In part two I'm going to talk to you about the writing. I'm blessed to only teach writing to our bright-eyed little firsties. Each class is 70 minutes long so we spend a lot of time in writers workshop, which I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! We get to conference with lots of children throughout the process which leads to great conversations about being authors. We think informative writing is so much easier for our firsties to write because it's just facts. No opinions, no story, just stating the facts. And state the facts they did.

Em and I have had long conversations about final copies of writing pieces. Do your firsties like to "publish" their pieces? Our firsties LOVE writing their pieces, but rewriting them....notsomuch. The time has been put in and they are not willing to redo what has been done. So for this writing piece, students wrote/drew pictures/revised, edited and then we typed them up. After that students only had to cut and paste their words onto blank white pages. I liked doing it this way because it gave them the power to choose where their words would go and what the book would look like. Once the words were in place, the illustrating began! Here are a few books. WARNING... there are a lot of pictures, but I wanted to show you the differences in our writers. The first book was one of my favs because he wrote about Salmon. What firstie chooses Salmon to write about???!!!??? This friend. :) His lead and fun fact are fantastic!

Here's a few of our writing pieces. :) Students had to write five chapters along with a lead and provide closure. Let me know what you think!