Work on Writing Daily Five Linky

Daily Five is an AMAZING and SUPER EASY approach to literacy centers.  If you haven't heard of Daily Five then you need to run now go check it out.  There is a a great book written by "The Sisters" that outlines everything you need to implement this approach in your classroom.

I am linking up with A Burst of First to share what we do for each of the fives in our classrooms.  Sadly, I missed the Word Work link up, but I do have our Word Work area in this post --> MY CLASSROOM.

Here is our word work area for my first grade class.  I did previously teach kindergarten so I want to make sure if any teachers are new to Daily Five that they know it looks much different in kindergarten.

By FAR my favorite thing in my work on writing area is our picture dictionaries and word strips.  These come in handy seriously EVERY DAY!!  I force myself to make the kids go there to find words rather than spell them for them. And very quickly, the kids become independent.  

These are the word strips I have on a ring for the kids to use:

These are the word charts I keep in page protectors in a small binder folder:

I have another set that I use with these word charts: 

The second favorite thing at my work on writing area is the stencils and how to draw books!  Kids can get SO frustrated when trying to draw so these resources are life savers.

Some of my favorite paper choices come from the following sources:

Here are some goodies I snapped that my kiddos have worked on at our writing area:

A big thanks to Deirdre from A Burst of First for hosting this linky!!

Amazing Authentic Adjectives

We started working on adjectives at least three weeks ago and I have been compiling all of our studies to share with you in one great post!!  I hope you will find some ideas that are new and you can use with your class.   We started off using the AMAZINGLY TALENTED Babbling Abby author of the Inspired Apple's Pop Rockin' Adjectives Pack!  Click either picture to take you to her TPT store to grab yourself a copy!

     

Luckily, I am the person at all the parties that creeps over the gift bags and tissue paper JUST in case the guest of honor doesn't want to take them home...I am there to save the day!  I dug around in my tote and found one fitting that would have many descriptive words.

   

The next day the kids were SOOOO excited to see what was in the bag!  We described the bag, the rocks, eating the rocks and all of the adjective goodness!  The kids had a lot of fun with this activity.

      

Another engaging and physical activity we did was with a partner.  I cut some pictures from magazines and then the kids rotated around the room to each picture.  They were asked to each write an adjective describing the pictures and to not duplicate any words already on the sheet.  I believe this was a very effective activity for them to deepen their understanding of what an adjective is and not use nouns!

We also incorporated comparative and superlative adjectives which I talked about a bit more on my No Worksheet Wednesday post which you can see HERE!

One of our cumulative projects we did was even more exciting than I had anticipated.  The kids were asked to do a descriptive writing project about their bedroom.  We usually have weekly homework sent home Monday and due Friday but I knew the picture would be more work.  I sent the directions home Monday instead of our weekly homework and had it due the following Monday.  The success of this project was time, love, and creativity!  The kids all did such a good job and it was fun to see their personalities in their rooms.  I am sure the parents appreciated that they probably cleaned their rooms without a fuss too.  I do not have a direct link to where I found this idea but it is credited to Misha Frander.

Hopefully you were able to get some fresh ideas for teaching those tricky adjectives to your kids and getting them to use them as well!!