This week our readers worked on changing their voice to match their characters’ feelings. We noticed a lot of little clues in the text that help us know when and how to change our voice like: ellipses, bold print, italics, CAPITAL LETTERS, quotation marks, and more. The kids had so much fun looking for these clues in their own books!
We also learned to hold on to the lessons in our stories. In our fiction books, our characters are always facing some sort of trouble and have to figure out ways to solve these big and small problems. We can learn from our characters, and can even act the same way they do, when the same kind of trouble happens to us!
This week in writing, we wrote a shared writing piece. We focused on all the things a good realistic fiction story should have and wrote a class story together.
After we spent a couple days working on our shared writing, we challenged the first graders to write their own story and to make sure the story had all the right details. They had two days to write their stories and I collected them to read on Friday. I was so impressed with how hard they worked and how creative they have been with their stories. This coming week we will wrap up our writing unit and celebrate our stories by the end of the week!
During our math time this week we studied some familiar shapes: rectangles, squares, triangles and circles. We learned that every shape has special attributes that are always true!!
We also learned that shapes can be divided into equal parts. When a shape is broken into two equal parts we call these halves. When a shape is broken into four equal parts we call these fourths. It’s important to understand halves and fourths especially when we are trying to share something (like a pizza, cookie, or granola bar) equally.