We love writing in Grade 1AC...especially letters!
After reading a portion of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, we decided to write a persuasive letter to the Zooks and Yooks to convince them to stop their conflict and find a peaceful solution. We had lots of ideas and many of us were able to write them down quite quickly and independently. When we re-read our letters though, we realized that they were good, but could use some improvement.
The next day, we used our Editing Hands to check our work. We checked for spaces between words and letters, correct spelling, punctuation (including full stops, exclamation points, and question marks), and capital and lower case letters. We used a coloured pencil to show where changes needed to be made.
After reading a portion of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss, we decided to write a persuasive letter to the Zooks and Yooks to convince them to stop their conflict and find a peaceful solution. We had lots of ideas and many of us were able to write them down quite quickly and independently. When we re-read our letters though, we realized that they were good, but could use some improvement.
The next day, we used our Editing Hands to check our work. We checked for spaces between words and letters, correct spelling, punctuation (including full stops, exclamation points, and question marks), and capital and lower case letters. We used a coloured pencil to show where changes needed to be made.
The next day we worked as a class to make more edits to a letter written by Ms. Alison. We focused on the Six Traits of Writing 'Sentence Fluency' and 'Word Choice'. We ask questions like: Did I use sentences? Do my sentences begin in different ways? Does my paper sound smooth as I listen to it? Have I used any new words? Did I try not to repeat words too many times? We highlighted the first words in the sentences and realized they all started the exact same way! Not only the first word was the same, but there were FOUR words exactly the same! As a group, we collected idea about how we could change our sentences.
The day after we revisited our own work. We worked in small groups to check our Sentence Fluency and Word Choice by asking the same questions. We highlighted the beginning words in sentences to check if they were the same. If we saw too much repetition, we thought of new ways to write our ideas.
Finally we were ready to publish our work. This means writing a final copy! We worked hard to use all of our editing ideas to make changes. After reading our work again we realized that we'd made some huge improvements!
Check out some examples of our work from the beginning to the end of the process:
Finally we were ready to publish our work. This means writing a final copy! We worked hard to use all of our editing ideas to make changes. After reading our work again we realized that we'd made some huge improvements!
Check out some examples of our work from the beginning to the end of the process: