Good afternoon!

I’m sure you’ve noticed that your child has been taking home lots of writing! For the first two weeks of this school year, I wanted students to have the freedom to write a lot for a few reasons.

First, I wanted to test their endurance and see how long our class could work on silently drawing a picture and writing about a specific topic.

Next, I wanted to informally assess the students’ understanding of what elements form a complete sentence and how to put sentences together to make a paragraph. I’ve also been looking at spelling, grammar, syntax, and puncutation.

Finally, I wanted students to get used to the initial structure I have for Centers in our classroom. For the first several weeks, we will be working in Centers as a whole class, following a schedule of DEAR (Drop Everything and Read), Silent Picture-Drawing, Silent Writing, Group Word Work, and a Fun Center.

While some of our students are very comfortable with using telling sentences and asking sentences (statements and questions) to form interesting short paragraphs, many of us need some review and additional support around forming a complete sentence and using punctuation to separate our thoughts.

Here is a short video we watched in class today that reminds us of important parts of a complete sentence: