Watermelon vs. Seed

Personal Narratives are stories we write about ourselves.  Rather than writing large watermelon narratives we have been focusing our ideas into "seed" stories.  The 1st graders thought of one small moment in their long 6 or 7 years old lives to write a seed story about.  We shared these ideas on a sticky note and added them to our class watermelon.

Class watermelon with seed sticky notes

  

Students took their idea and used transition words to break the story into a sequence of events.  Like all good writers we began with detailed pictures.  Next, we added sentences that we revised and edited. We always use green pens to edit our work. All circled words are ones we need to look up in a pictionary.  We also check for capitals and periods.

Small moment story with transition words

After we finished our first small moment story, we brainstormed a big watermelon idea that we could write lots of "seed" stories about.  We took these watermelons and glued them in our writer's notebook to use as ideas for future writing.