Hands On Graphic Organizers for Writing

I love to use Graphic Organizers with all the writing we do!  Recently, I have been trying to incorporate using graphic organizers with even my youngest Kinder ELL students to support their writing.  One great way I found to do this was doing more hands-on organizers with which the students can practice organizing the information on a larger scale together. We recently did a mini-unit on the different animal groups.  We created this graphic organizer after reading our Animal Groups Emergent Reader and watching this excellent BrainPop Jr. video about animal classification.
Last, students wrote their own animal facts about their chosen group using these  awesome writing sheets from www.firstgradewindows.blogspot.com .The students were able to gain a lot of content vocabulary and loved the hands-on approach!   Please add comments on how you use graphic organizers with young students. 



 

BrainPop Video

 

Click here for the Book





 



Powerful Language -Strong Verbs

One of my favorite Language topics to teach each year is my Strong Verbs Unit!  I love teaching it and the students love the hands-on way to study Strong Verbs and Synonyms!  I love that by the end of the unit, you can really see the difference in the students' personal narratives, especially when it comes to using a variety of words in their writing and using a variety of tools to find new words.  It's great to see the students taking their own initiative to go get  thesaurus, use MS word to find new words, or a variety of online tools to get rid of those BORING VERBS!  Here are some of the students' favorites activities that we do in the unit:

Strong Verb Synonym Sort:

Strong Verb Word Clouds-These are a blast!  I always get lots of comments from staff, students, and parents on how cool these look in the hallway.

These activities and more can all be found in my Strong Verbs Unit.