Pumpkin Life Cycle Explanatory Writing

This week my first graders are learning all about pumpkins!  Today we went to the pumpkin farm, and on Friday we are having pumpkin day where we will have parents help with pumpkin learning stations all day.  Throughout the week, we have been working on writing explanatory text about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  Our district's professional development initiative this year is writing, so we have been connecting our writing to the common core standards.  This explanatory text is a great introduction to writing non-fiction.  The lessons and templates are below as well as the titles of the mentor texts we are using.  Click below to read more!

                                  {Images provided by Scrappin' Doodles}
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Publishing Party!!

So after using the template in my last post to create some amazing picture books,

my first graders and I celebrated this accomplishment with a "Publishing Party."  When our kids went to lunch and recess, my colleague and I decorated our rooms with streamers!  This first publishing party was a surprise.

 Then on each child's desk, we put their finished narrative writing, a medal with their name on it (made of paper, template below), and a slip of paper for other children to leave comments about their writing!  Click on this picture to download the medals and comment sheet for yourself!

When the kids came in they were excited, surprised, and confused!  We sat all the first graders down and told them the procedures for the publishing party!  The directions were to take their narrative story, their comment sheet, and a pencil, and they could walk around and "hand up pair up" with as many other children as possible to share their narrative and get comments!  My colleague and I participated of course, and I got to hear each child's story and leave a comment.  We also had other teachers come in.  Overall, it was a huge success!  The kids were engaged in their learning and reading for about 45 minutes!  Wowowow!  We loved it, and we will definitely be doing this again next quarter!

Vintage Teacher Guest Author!

Hey everyone!  Pam at Vintage Teacher has made me a guest author on her blog!  If you are not a follower of Vintage Teacher, click the link and follow her because she has some excellent ideas!  Also check out my Writer's Workshop picture book idea she posted.  My kids did this last week, and they created some AMAZING picture books by just doing one page a day!  We stapled them together at the end for a publishing party.  I will have the publishing party downloads available later this week!  The template download for the picture book is below here as well as on Pam's blog:

PublishedPictureBookTemplate