Even your most reluctant writers will enjoy contributing a page to a class made book. I try to make one each week, sometimes more depending on the themes I’m doing.
Students TRACE the sentence and fill in the blank. So that they don’t have a problem with spelling and I can manage this activity with an entire class without a lot of repetitive questions, I gather everyone in front of the white board.
Read the prompt and then ask your students to give you as many examples as they can think of.
I tell my Y5’s to put on their thinking caps and we make motions and sounds to do that.
As they raise their hands and give me suggestions, I write them on the board.
They choose an idea from the list and then take their seats and get down to business.
I always do a sample, complete with an illustration, so that they have a model to refer to, that is posted on the board.
When everyone is done with their page, we do the graphing extension(s). I laminate their contributions + the graph(s) and put them into a book, and then read it to the class.
Afterwards, it goes into our “Class Made Books” basket. This is one of my students’ favorite items to read during quiet time.
Some of the books we make I develop as a nice follow up for a popular story that we’ve just read.
These stories usually follow a theme such as Jan Brett’s The Mitten or the classic winter fairy tale The Gingerbread Man.
For the gingerbread story, I pass out Keebler gingerbread cookies and tell my students to take just one bite. I ask for a show of hands to see who bit off what and then they write and illustrate their page. I also graph the results.
Click on the link to view/print Our Mitten class book.
Click on the link to view/print Our Gingerbread Man class book.
For more winter fun writing Class Books click on the link.
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As always, if you have an idea you’d like to share, I’d enjoy hearing from you. I’m currently looking for topics and books that teachers want me to make class books and writing prompts for. diane@teachwithme.com
Happy Winter Writing!
