Informational Writing

I'm already behind on blogging...of course! We have just kicked off our third nine weeks and our hot topic this quarter is non-fiction. We have been diving into exploring non-fiction text and using non-fiction text to write.

That being said, our writing standard for this quarter is informational writing. Writing has been one of those things that I have had to learn to teach one day at a time. Writing is hard. Plain and Simple! A student teacher also in first grade came to me a few days ago and asked me for some writing tips because she heard I was the team "expert." Hmm... A few tips I gave her were:

1. Model every single day! Let the kids see you write. Let them see you make mistakes in your writing, too. They will correct you, I promise! 
2. Practice! They have to practice writing EVERY single day. Let them come up with topics on their own, too. If they can't think of any ideas, I do have a basket of writing ideas available to help them get their brains moving. 
3. Conference. Even if it's for two seconds. It's important to meet with your kids about their writing one-on-one. Tell them how to improve and tell them what they loved.
4. Author's Chair. Let them share. Give them time to share what they wrote as often as you can. Make them feel proud of their writing. 

More specifically, I was asked "how in the world do we teach the concept of informational writing to first graders?" That's tough! I introduced this style of writing by creating an anchor chart. 

After defining it, we practiced a little! I split the kids into groups and assigned each group an animal. They were instructed to write everything they knew about their animal. They ended up coming up with some pretty great stuff. 

The next day, we took a closer look at how we could organize our informative writing pieces. Click here to download my informative writing organizer. This tool was excellent. It laid out exactly what was expected of them. Each of them chose their own animal and filled in their own facts. 

I spent Wednesday meeting with every student about their writing. Crucial. 

Hope my writing tips were somewhat helpful. Writing is always the best time to get to know my students. I love it!

Tomorrow is the 100th day of school.. more on that later this week!