We have been making our writing easy to read in Writer’s Workshop. It is important that we are able to read what we write, and other people should be able to read it as well! That way, it is easy to share the amazing stories we write. There are a few ways we can make sure our writing is easy to read…

– Finger Spaces

– Capital Letters

– Punctuation

– Spelling words spelled correctly

– Neat Handwriting

We spent some time talking about capital letters this week.

We learned that every sentence starts with a capital letter. We also learned that names start with capital letters. We noticed that the word “I” is always capital because it replaces our name, which is a very important word!

We also worked on using punctuation correctly in our stories. We noticed that without punctuation, the reader doesn’t have a good place to pause and take a breath and our writing doesn’t make sense. When we add punctuation to our small moment story, it slows down our story, and it makes our story easier to read and more understandable.

This is hard for first graders because in order for them to know where to put a period, they need to understand where a sentence ends (and what qualifies as a sentence). We discussed how a sentence needs to have a WHO and a WHAT. We practiced building sentences to help them identify an incomplete sentence compared to a complete sentence.  The first graders did a lot of experimenting on where to put periods. We noticed that if we went back and added punctuation, we needed to make sure we capitalized the first letter after our punctuation since it was the beginning of a new sentence.

These are complex skills which take time to develop, but we will continue to work on improving our stories so that we can make them easier to read.