Keeping it fun!

We have lots of important learning to do in first grade, but I do my best to keep it fun! One of the students' favorite tools in the classroom is our interactive whiteboard (which we refer to as the "Smartboard"). Today, I displayed scrambled up words on the Smartboard to emphasize sentence "rules"--sentences should always make sense, begin with an uppercase letter, and have punctuation at the end. I asked students to come up and move the word cards around to create a sentence that made sense and had proper punctuation. After practicing/reviewing sentence rules together, students wrote a dictated sentence special SWR paper. This lesson connected nicely to our Writing Workshop minilesson about spaces between words (see below). :-)

Space Man came to visit during Writing Workshop! Space Man is a finger puppet (I'll try to take his photo sometime soon) who comes to my writing minilessons on occasion to remind students how important it is to leave white space between words. He helped us compare sentences with space between words and without. Which of these sentences is easier to read?

Puttingspacesbetweenwordsmakesiteasiertoread.
Putting spaces between words makes it easier to read. :-)

Students received their own personal Space Man sticks to keep in their writing folders to remind them about leaving enough space between words. Some students chose to place it on the page to help determine how much space should go between words, and some just used it as a visual reminder. Both are great uses for this fun tool!

We have LOTS of characters that come through our classroom...ask your child about Backwards Bob, Echo, and Word Bird...