Brave Irene

The students finished up their Brave stories this week.  This is one of my favorite writing pieces that we work on.  We start this writing with a mentor text, Brave Irene.  It is read online by Mr. Al Gore, and I included the link in case you wanted to hear the story yourself.  Then we spent some time planning our stories by using the planning paper that guides them through a format for the story.  I find that narrative creative stories at this age work better when they have a structure to work within.  Otherwise, the stories end of not making sense.  Sometimes!  :)  We focused on story structure, transitions, and descriptive words.  We also worked on creative and descriptive weather sentences.  The stories will go into their memory books, but the planning papers and drafts should have come home this week.  We are still working on grade level conventions, especially spelling.  We are making progress, though.  We addressed quotation marks by adding talking sentences in key places in the story as they felt necessary.

It's Snowing!

It's snowed today!  Well...it snowed paper snowflakes!  Thanks to the helping hands of Mrs. Washam, we were able to turn our classroom into a winter wonderland in a short amount of time!  The students were also great helpers to each other.  This is a great group of kids!  Maybe we will get some real snow this year?