Perfect Plump Pumpkin Alliterations

Our perfectly pretty pumpkin published alliterations are done! Alliterations are sentences that have the same sound repeated at the beginning of many words. First, we used pictionaries to help brainstorm words that start with the beginning sound in our names. We unscrambled funny alliterations on the Smartboard to help us understand that our alliterations must make sense. Students then wrote a sentence to make their own alliterations that went with their adorable pumpkins.

Wait, we weren't done yet. Next, we used the iPads and took a picture of our pumpkins in the courtyard. As a class we recorded ourselves fluently reading our sentences using one of our favorite apps Chappterpix. Make sure to watch our final published piece above.

First Grade Common Core Standard for Writing: With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

Pumpkins!

A huge thank you to the Hanglin family for their very generous donation of pumpkins for the whole classroom! We have made the most of this bountiful harvest and completed different learning activities with our pumpkins.

First, we turned into scientists to observe our pumpkins. We used all of our senses - we smelled the pumpkins, felt the pumpkins, and looked at the pumpkins' color, shape, texture, lines, etc.

Next, we decorated our orange friends and turned them into pumpkin pals. We used them to help us practice our reading fluency. Our pumpkins really enjoyed hearing our just right books!

Stay tuned because next we are using our pumpkins for fun fall writing!

Pen Pal Letters

A very special part of being in our 1st grade classroom is having a penpal! This school year, Mrs. Dunn's 1st graders in Topsfield, MA and our class will get to know each other through letters. Mrs. Dunn and I are excited to bring penpal letters to our classrooms as a way to connect our Tri-Town schools. In a few years these groups of 1st graders will be at MASCO together. Towards the end of September we were the first to send off letters introducing ourselves to our penpals.

Our letters were signed, sealed and ready to deliver. We walked them up to the mailboxes and off they went.

 

We have been anxiously checking the mail and waiting to hear back. Just a few days ago we got a message from Mrs. Dunn's class on Twitter and instantly wrote back.

Now we watch the mail as we know these pumpkin pals are in transit. There is still something to be said about the good old fashioned snail mail. 

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.

Students took one of their "seed" ideas and used transition words to break the story into a sequence of events. Like all good writers, we began with detailed draft pictures. Next, we added sentences that we revised with our green pens and edited with our purple pens. All circled words are ones we need to look up in a pictionary. We also checked for capitals and periods. Yes, we're only in first grade!

Small moment story with transitions

The last stage of the writing process is to publish our work, meaning we copied it over in our neatest printing so the reader never knows we made so many revisions and edits. To celebrate all our hard writing work we had a publishing party with Mrs. E. Higgins' class.

Common Core State Standard: Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.

Pumpkin Adjectives

Clever 1st graders practiced their knowledge of adjectives or words that describe nouns, by making adorable Adjective Pumpkins. Enthusiastic students chose an adjective from the back table and then created a pumpkin that matched that describing word.

Smart students really grasped the concept of an adjective with this activity...thank you Halloween! Precious 1st graders were even coming up to our adjective wall to use them in their writing pieces.

They couldn't be making their happy teacher prouder!