Fun with Writng

 We have been using our writing center time to dig deeper with our writing skills. I have been telling the students that I want more details and sentences using adjectives and vocabulary that will be interesting. They have the paragraph down with the topic sentence, three detail sentences, and the wrap-up sentence now they need to "beef-up" their writing to make it more interesting. Here are several of the ways that they have worked on their skills. After reading fiction and non-fiction stories on the groundhog the students wrote in first person about their own groundhog home. For Valentine's Day they tried writing poetry with a FRIENDS acrostic poem. We just finished our week with a fun writing activity about the Angry Birds. They loved making the Angry Birds and most chose to skip Friday Fun Time to make more birds. We have also just finished up our math and adding with and without regrouping. They did a great job with this and continue working on their facts to make these more difficult problems easier to compute.

Hidden in the Snow Writing
The students absolutely loved this writing project. After our read-aloud of A Very Special Snowflake by Don Hoffman, about a cute little white dog who they can't find in the snow, students composed a list of clues for something lost in the snow. Then, they colored picture with their hidden object in it and added a clear acetate sheet on top with paint to hide the object underneath, just like in the pages of Eric Carle's, Dream Snow. The students were so fun hiding behind a partition to create the final touches on their project so no one would see what they had hidden in their picture. Finally, the students read their clues, one-by-one and let one person guess after each clue and then flipped up the acetate to show the hidden object. I even had one student who had to write about a Komodo Dragon and of course a Komodo would never be in the snow and needed to make a "sand" picture instead. Thanks to Mrs. Bainbridge for this wonderful idea!