Back to School: Writing and Craftivity

Hi Everyone!

I'm Heather from The Busy Busy Hive.

I'm a 1st grade teacher going into my 11th year.

I hope you have been enjoying your summer.

Every year I struggle with having my first graders writing enough. 

To help get them writing more and to help me to have an organized writing center/activity for each day, I created Desk Buddies.

This set includes all 5 of of the Desk Buddies shown.

Last year I had the students complete a different page each day.

Every Monday students would come in and find the desk buddy craft on their desk.

They were expected to color, cut, fold and stand their desk buddy on their desk.

This was their morning work and they looked forward to a new one each week.

At first I completed the writing pages together as a class.

On Monday we would also complete the circle map.

We would brainstorm different words to go along with our Desk Buddy.

Tuesday we worked on the 5 senses map.  At first students weren't able to writing out words and would get very nervous about their writing.  I always allowed them to draw pictures and to try and label them as best they could by sounding out the words.

Wednesday was the Can, Have, Are map day.

I tried to get them to come up with at least 2 different things for each section.

Thursday we worked on completing the details map.

I tried to get the students to use complete sentences and correct punctuation too.

Up until this point I didn't really stress those.

This took a lot of modeling and help from me at first.

On Friday we worked on bringing our topic into a short story.

Complete sentences, punctuation, and spelling were expected.

I had to do a lot of modeling and helping the students out.

At first the only words I was expecting them to spell correct were spelling words we might have had and words on our word wall.  All other words could be kid spelled words.

 These pages can be used as daily writing pages in a writing center, time fillers, morning work, homework, or for early finishers.

The different types of writing pages makes it easy to differentiate for your student’s needs. 

Use them all or pick and choose.

You can grab this August set HERE for only $1 from July 19-21.