Four-Square Writing

The four-square writing method can be used at almost every elementary level and can even be creatively adapted for middle school or high school writers. For first grade it helps to model writing at it's most basic level; combining words to make a sentence. With the fall season here, and weather as one of our science topics, students in Room 108 brainstormed together around the "fall" topic. Below are two examples of student work from our four-square writing activity. The front side is the brainstorm activity, done as a class. The topic "fall" is in the circle with the four squares identifying how fall looks, feels, smells, and things they like to do.

The second image is the reverse side of the four-square, which is completed independently. Each box is numbered on both sides so children know which box they are writing in when they are flipping back and forth. Each square on the reverse challenges students to piece together the words from the brainstorm into complete sentences with a capital letter and punctuation mark. For the "fall" topic, three of the four sentences begin with the word fall. When a sentence is complete, children are then to draw a picture that illustrates the sentence for the box.

The two images combine for a great example of a finished product from a four-square writing lesson. The two pictures are from two different students and show that students are not creating the same four sentences. The whole class brainstorm offers student to pick words and create sentences unique to their interpretation of the topic. In this case you can see that in square number four, one student likes to jump into leaf piles in the fall while the other likes to ride bike in the fall. Four-square writing requires an extended amount of student focus, effort, critical thinking and creativity about a topic. The fall four-square writing was a great success!

Falling Into Unit 2

Autumn is here which means the end of September and the start of colder weather is right around the corner. We have been pretty lucky over the last couple weeks of summer to have plenty of sunshine and gently cooling breezes to make the outdoors plenty inviting. As the new season grows on us in Room 108, students are developing skills of individual responsibility and learning to work hard. It's been quite rewarding to see how much progress has taken place for students in the still very young school year!

Open-Court Reading has Unit 2 titled Animals and focuses stories on a variety of animals, families and activities. Reading strategies students will be practicing are visualizing and predicting. Both strategies are important skills for engaging in stories and encouraging children to form thoughts and pictures in their minds. Phonics skills include initial and ending letter sounds of words, short vowel sounds, and blending (decoding) unfamiliar words. Writing skills like spelling, sentence structure, capitalization and punctuation are being introduced in as many ways as possible. Journaling will serve as the students greatest opportunity to explore writing in their own way. More structured writing lessons will model writing and offer focused approaches to writers' skills.

Everyday Math pushes ahead with the continuation of skills covered in unit one and introduces new concepts such as analog clocks (telling time to the hour and half hour), complements of 10 (an early concrete addition skill), number sequence, and using the number grid as a tool. If you are keeping up with math homelinks you will see many of these skills being reviewed often.

After one and a half (long) days (trapped in one room with 29 other first grade teachers) of science curriculum training courtesy of District 97 and our new publishing companies, Houghton Mifflin and Carolina's STC, science topics are finalized and will be brought into the classroom very soon. For more info on either publisher click on their name. The first grade units are Weather, Solids & Liquids, and Organisms. The units over lap each other and complement many of the other curricular pieces in a variety of ways. When we start science lessons in the classroom you should see letters and artifacts in your child's Mail folder.

More to come! Until then, I hope to see you soon on the blacktop!