1st and 2nd Grade Writing Workshops Through Distance Learning

As we enter our fourth week of distance learning, our first and second grade students are hard at work working on their writing projects they started at the beginning of March. In first grade, our young writers are investigating small moment stories. For this writing project, students first chose a moment in time they wanted to remember and then stretched it out into a 5 page story. After finishing their first draft, they have been watching recorded mini lessons on the revising process. Students are learning that revising their work means adding more or different words to make their stories even better! By going through the revising checklist, 1st grade writers are adding details by first replaying a mind movie to remember things they saw, smelled, or heard, adding dialogue between characters on at least one of their pages, and showing instead of telling their feelings by asking themselves how their bodies may react to certain emotions. They are also learning what a strong hook is at the beginning of a story and ending stories close to the most exciting part instead of jumping far away and writing things like “and then I went home, and then I went to bed” etc. Once they finished revising their stories, 1st grade writers then started editing their stories to make sure their audience is able to follow along and make sense of their newly revised stories. They’ve been watching recorded lessons on finger spaces, spelling, capitalization and punctuation. Once the editing process is complete at the end of the week, students will type up their stories, add their illustrations and record themselves reading them. The recording will then be shared with their other classmates!

Second graders have been working on taking a stand and sharing their thoughts in opinion writing! In preparation of writing their five paragraph opinion essay, students have been writing OREO (opinion, reason, evidence, opinion) paragraphs to share their thoughts and back them up with reasons and evidence. During one lesson, they focused on the power word “because” and thought of reasons to support their opinion. They have also been practicing using transitions like “I think, one example is, to prove this, another reason is”, etc. . For their opinion essay, they will be focusing on the question ‘what is the best type of weather.’ After creating outlines to support their opinions, they will construct an introduction paragraph, three reason paragraphs that support their opinion, and a conclusion paragraph. In each body paragraph, they will have to support each individual reason with three pieces of evidence that support their reasons. During the writing process, students have also practiced responding to each other’s work and saying why they agree or disagree with their classmate. Next week they will revise their essays to strengthen their reasons and write about other opinions they have!

This blog post was co-written by Marjorie Haley, Zev Bliss, and Chelsea Verria