Adding Rigor to Writing at an Early Age!

Students in Jess Heaton's 1st grade classroom are becoming published authors. As discussed at an Examining Student Work meeting at Barnes, if younger students explore all of the writing genres and move beyond constructing a sentence to developing a full writing piece (with a beginning, middle and ending) they will have a solid foundation as the CCSS become more difficult in future years.

Thanks to Nicole Barboza, I found a terrific resource to engage students in the writing process.Below is an example of one of the writing tasks. Students were asked to write a personal narrative about "My Special Day." This was the first developed piece students wrote.

In the next piece, Jess had her students create an opinion piece about their favorite fruit. The secret to success is having students spend considerable time orally discussing their thoughts before cementing their ideas on paper.

As you can see, the graphic organizers are extremely supportive, with sentence stems and sentence starters provided, making the writing seamless.

 

Thanks Jess for sharing your students' work! The writing process for these students is becoming a fluid transition from developing one well crafted sentence!