Our Spider Writing Potpurri

I must preface this post in that it is not oh so pretty. Also I am a little late in posting. This is one of those things that kept growing and working as part of our mini writing lessons tied in with our spider theme and skills for the week.

It started as a review to what a sentence is and should have at the beginning and end of it while tying in our spider theme. It seems like we are always working on this skill, but we are getting it. But this mini writing lesson grew into just about a week of mini-writing lessons.

Day 1- I had posters taped around the room. Each had a different picture of a spider. Students went from poster to poster and wrote down something they observed in the photo. Students moved once they heard music. I like to use the many alarms sounds on my phone for this to spice it.

Day 2- We were also working on adjectives that week. I noticed with our observation sentences many were used. So students were paired up. They were each given a highlighter and shared a poster. They worked together to find and highlight adjectives. We even got into a discussion on similes thanks to one student's sentence. Love when teachable moments happen like that!

Day 3- We revisited our posters after working with facts and opinions. Just like Day 2, students paired up with a poster and each with a highlighter. They had to read each sentence decide if it was a fact or opinion and marked it with an F or O once they decided. As a class we kept a tally of facts and opinions to see what we wrote more of. 

This is definitely an approach I plan to use again. Thinking it would be a great thing to do when we working more in depth with inferencing.

Happy Saturday!