Small Moments

My first grade partners and I wanted to start our small moments this month in Writers Workshop so to introduce the concept we used a variety of mentor text to introduce our students to zooming in on one moment. My great PLC partner Ms. Cortez had seen these Kevin Henkes books with this idea and we decided to expand upon it.

We used various mentor texts to introduce the concept of zooming in on one small moment. We started with the book Wave by Suzy Lee. It's a wordless book but it's a great way to introduce the concept of how there need only be one focus character. As well as how you can stretch a whole five minutes of playing with a wave into a story. We charted each book that we read. 

The second book we used is one of my favorites "Night of the Veggie Monster". This is also a great book for teaching zooming in on one moment. It also lends itself to introducing rich vocabulary and the use of descriptive words (but that would be another lesson!).
We began by charting the characters, the "one time" this story took place.

The one place this story happened, and of course the something that happened in the story. These Kevin Henkes books are great for this concept. They focus on just one character, one moment and one thing happening.

This is one student sample one of my students wrote. ......"Saturday I went to buy milk with my sister and she said did you lock the door Yes?."

 Its a start! He has his one time, Saturday, his one place needs some work, his one thing is him going to buy milk and I especially love that he used dialogue. We will most certainly continue to work on small moments this month so to facilitate their writing I created a student friendly writing checklist for my students to use during their writing. I use it to help them keep track of their writing. Because we are a dual language classroom I created it in both English and Spanish. Both are available at my TPT store.

Expository Writing

At the end of the year we changed our focus from fiction writing to expository writing. We began the unit by introducing expository texts on animals and insects to our students. We charted  features of expository texts, such as headings, captions, and photographs

                   over a period of a couple of weeks. 

After being exposed to numerous types of expository texts, we then had our students select and research one animal or insect. They read every book on their animal they could find in our classroom library, school library or local library as well as read articles or stories online. They created a diorama of their animals habitat and gave an oral presentation as well of all they had learned about their animal.

 

After all they learned our students culminated their project by writing their own expository articles about their animals. I was so excited to see them make their own table of contents page as well as have bold print for headings.

My favorite was seeing their author page. I especially enjoyed how my students pointed out that they needed to list all of their previous publications just like Mo Willems does at the end of his books! 

Of course at the end we displayed all their great writing proudly for all to see.

Small Moments

We have started our unit on Small Moments. I started by making this chart to help my students get started on what to write about. I saw it in English during my training at Teachers College at Columbia University.  This is what my team partner and I came up with as the Spanish version.  (I did add a drawing of our writing paper next to step 3..but it was added after I took the picture.) Hope this helps.