Good luck in the upcoming season to my fellow TPT sellers!
After a month off for summer vacation, it's time to gear up for the new school year. I am polishing up a centers packet I have been working on for six months or more. I also found a great resource with tons of back to school links from Unique Teaching Resources.
Good luck in the upcoming season to my fellow TPT sellers!
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I am happy to announce my newest unit for teaching Expository Writing in the elementary grades. It's modeled after my bestselling product - Second Grade Expository Topic Sentences Unit.
A Wormy Spring! is themed for spring and concerns science facts about Worms. As you are teaching parts of a flower, what a seed needs, spring weather, food chain and biodiversity, composting, and other science content, you will find it easy to connect with students' prior knowledge. This is also a stand-alone unit. My new product for teaching expository writing is intended for grades 2 through 4. It can also work for students in grade 5 to middle school who are working below grade level in reading and writing. Enjoy! I am excited to announce that I have two new mini units just in time for Dr. Seuss' birthday. At my school, we are celebrating Read Across America on March 10. Whether you are doing it March 3 or March 10 or some other day, you can enjoy these mini units now or any time of year.
The Dr. Seuss Meets Eric Carle unit encourages students to write an adventure story. The Spring is Sprung! unit encourages you and your students to write a poem with rhyming couplets and made-up words. Both units are opportunities to use content words and help students remember what they mean. Enjoy! Well, it's time to take apart my best selling product and share parts with the world for free. Expository writing is essential for working in a digital economy. Today, I'm also happy to announce I'm taking my little WWW to the next level. Now, teachers around the world can enjoy some free downloads without having to scour through TeachersPayTeachers.com! That's because I updated to a paid site through Weebly.com. MyCommon Core ELA "Polar Bears" Expository Writing Unit was fully tested in my classroom last fall. The kids were able to fully access all materials to their best ability, and the only materials that were too hard for them were the Polar Bear fact sheets and sorts, principally because the science terms exceeded their reading levels. Here are some free previews and downloads of my materials from this unit! How to Build a Simple Expository Writing Unit: 1. Pick your theme: Example "Polar Bears" 2. Build the lesson plan to fit the scope and sequence of your state or school district, also called your academic plan. What Common Core standards will your unit address? How will you focus instruction on specific grade-level content through targeted activities? <--Here is mine from this Expository unit! 3. Decide how you will motivate students and give them an objective and simple explanation of the concept. One way is through a motivational poster. I also created Woodchuck Writing Workshop dollars and mini-posters for a different writing unit.
This week, some of my students are reading "Frog and Toad Together." I just published a new Sentence Builder Literacy Center to help them practice their new spring vocabulary.
It's important to give students models of different kinds of sentences. Illustrations help them make meaning from unfamiliar words. These are black and white and easy to print. Let your students use these sentences to build stories or expository paragraphs. Enjoy! http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/K-1-Spring-Gardening-Sentence-Builders-Literacy-Center-1096233 Teaching some aspects of my woodchuck's unit has been fun. It's amazing that the students never seem to get tired of learning about animals and their habitats. This helps me understand why the Reading Street series is so heavy on animal expository text.
We are getting to that time of year when there are only a limited number of weeks left to fit in the key skills that will prepare our students for the next grade. We are down to the wire, but we still have a good chunk of time left with which to change up our plans and routines. Building a strong foundation for expository text has gone well, but getting students to the point where as emergent readers they can write their own expository text remains a challenge. Despite lots of videos, realia, and pictures, some kids just take a long time to build their confidence and use inventive spelling for writing prompts. I am very excited about seeing that light bulb turn on in my students. It happens at the most unexpected times. For more free information and a look at my updated Woodchucks Unit for struggling readers, please visit my TPT store. I also have lots of cool giveaways, including the free Woodchucks game and the Polar Bear cards that have been very popular. My newest creation is a small Woodchucks Writing Motivational Kit with woodchuck money for teachers to give as rewards to students who are using proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar. I added 16 more pages to this unit.
There are ideas for getting kids to write about what they observe in pictures in preparation for science writing in the middle and upper grades. There are also another easier version of the Nonfiction Woodchuck Story, 4 new pictures, 2 pictures for compare/contrast (woodchuck and hoary marmot), 6 sentence frame cards for beginning writers, 2 new fact sheets, a class graph page, a Wordle template, and word sorts for syllables and parts of speech. I have just added a new product to TPT store.
These supplemental materials which are a unit in themselves are being sold separately, all based on the Woodchuck theme. |