Snowy shared writing and Cause and Effect

We had a little tease of snow at the beginning of the week. Not enough to cancel school, but enough to get us excited about snow writing. First, I had students write about a snow day. They could choose to write a true story or make up a story. Before writing, we brainstormed words that we may use in a story about snow and had some time to talk about our stories. As I went around and worked with students, I took short notes on what we needed to work on. The next day, we did this shared writing activity:

For this activity, I "held the pen" the whole time, but the class gave me ideas of what to write. Together we crafted this story. I gave them guidance of course, particularly with sequencing the story, adding details, and staying on topic. As I write, I call on different kids to help with different skills (based on my notes from the previous day). For example,  if I noticed that a student was not using inflectional endings while writing, I'd call on them to help me identify the base word first, then add the inflectional ending. We tried to come up with interesting words for our story too. We went back changed some words, like ate to gobbled or went to dashed. We had so much fun making this story together. Shared writing is a great opportunity to model good writing, and teach kids at all different levels. 

After reading our story story, we went back and searched for the things that you see written on the yellow sentence strips. 

This week we are also working on Cause and Effect. First I made this anchor chart using a story from our reading program.

Then we completed this graphic organizer that goes along with The Hat. 

You can find this graphic organizer, along with another one to go with The Mitten in my Jan Brett pack. You can also find one in my Bear books pack.