Poetry Writing Unit

Enjoying our Poetry Month!

I love when first graders write poetry!  We have been doing a unit on Free Verse Poetry.  There is not a lot of emphasis on structure or perfect sentences so they have the freedom to get creative while trying out some different techniques!  When I do this unit, I notice even the struggling students really excelling because of its free-form style.   They have been writing poems about many different things… summer, cousins, cats… and even bacon!  

We have spent a few weeks on this "Free Verse" poetry unit.  Take a look at the photos below to get an idea of how it went!  We still have a few more mini-lessons to go.  

This is what I follow.  It is part of my Poetry Writing Unit that you can find here on TPT.

 Click on the preview picture below to purchase my Poetry Unit.  It gives you day-to-day mini-lessons that include suggested dialogue and read alouds.  The unit is filled with student examples, anchor charts, book recommendations,activities, parent letters, self-reflection sheets, talking points and so much more!

I'll give out this unit to the first 5 people who comment for free!  Please leave a comment below with your email address and I'll send it out to you.

Thanks for stopping by!

Nonfiction Writing Unit… Coming Along!

Our books are coming along!  Before the break, we took notes, wrote our pages, revised our headings, and created a diagram page…. We did so much writing that their little hands were so tired after our writing block.  It was very cute to see them stretching out their hands!

 This week, we are adding the final touches to make these books even better!  We are adding photos (from google images), writing captions, making words bold, and illustrating.  Tomorrow we are going to be adding a table of contents and then it's off to the copy center for laminating and binding!  I am really proud of them.  They did a great job.  This might be my favorite writing units!

If you are interested in my non-fiction writing unit of study, click here or on the photo below.  This unit  focuses on 4 animals (cheetahs, dolphins, great white sharks, and american alligators), but you could easily use the unit for other animals or topics!

Non-Fiction Writing

Well, we have had 2 snow days and 2- 2 hour delays, so we are s-l-o-w-l-y getting through our nonfiction writing unit.   Since we just finished our penguin unit the class had a pretty good understanding of nonfiction books and the text features.  But we took a few days to read and review those features with an anchor chart… I had them pick cards with examples and match them to the text features.

Then they got to pick an animal to research.  I narrowed the animal choices down to dolphins, great white sharks, american alligators, and cheetahs. (I just happen to have a lot of books about these animals and I made some mini books for each student to have).  They get to underline and highlight important facts in these mini books, while taking notes in their note-taking packets.  They look so cute and grown up highlighting and note-taking!!!  I love it!

If the weather cooperates and we ever get a full school day, we will start revising our books by creating captions, glueing in photos, changing our headings, creating diagrams and writing a table of contents.

If you are interested in my Non-Fiction Writing Unit, check it out on TPT!  It has very detailed daily mini lessons, anchor chart suggestions,  minibooks, a notetaking packet, posters, templates, diagrams…. the list goes on!

Here is a text-feature poster freebie…  I plan to send one home with each student so they can refer to it when reading nonfiction books.

Click Here For Non-Fiction Freebie

Election Day Writing

Hi Everyone!  I plan to use this activity this week for an Election Day lesson.  We usually read Duck for President, by Doreen Cronin.  This is such a cute book.  The kids love it!  If you have a Bookflix subscription, you can watch it on there.  After reading we take a vote:  Do you think Duck should be president?  (Yes?  No?)  During this vote we  discuss reasons to back up their voting choice.

Then we use the graphic organizer to write 3 reasons why or why not Duck should be president.

Finally, we use our graphic organizers to help us write a 3-5 paragraph friendly letter!

This activity is one of my favorites!

Enjoy my freebie!

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