Telling Good Stories

Before winter break we finished our persuasive writing unit. We celebrated by watching the book reviews that the students had digitally published. The kids really enjoyed seeing themselves and their friends sharing their work. I have one more student I need to record who has been absent, but when that is complete I will have the link available so I can share videos with you. Important: If you wish for your child's video NOT to be included in the link, please let me know and I will omit them. Thanks for your help with this!

This week we began our new unit - telling good stories (with an emphasis on a well developed beginning, middle, and end with rich details.) During this unit, students will continue their development of storytelling skills within this unit of study, as they write true, somewhat true, or realistic fictional small moment personal narratives. In Kindergarten, students learned to sequence stories across the pages of a book, adding feelings and engaging readers with their beginning and end.  We will expand this work in First grade by developing transitions with temporal words to signal event order.  Students will also learn how strong verbs and adjectives are used to develop plot and character.

In the embedded language study, students learn to use three specific parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, and prepositions) with specific purpose – to help in the creation of a scene – a physical place where action is happening.

Telling Good Stories not only supports a child’s growth as a writer, but also as a storyteller.  Storytelling skills will help students’ reading comprehension, conversational skills, and imagination.  For example, students can strengthen their understanding of characters by rewriting a favorite book through the perspective of another character, having characters from two different stories meet each other, or writing an alternate ending to a book. This work will tie in with our character study unit in reading, which is coming up.

Of course the students continue to work on consistently using their best handwriting, using capital letters appropriately, and using punctuation consistently.