Valentine's Day Writing Activities and Free Writing Activities

Everyone loves Valentine's Day. It's a great holiday to get your students writing. I have had such great feedback on my seasonal writing activities packets that I decided to make one just for Valentine's Day. It is a smaller version than my other ones, but is full of wonderful activities to help students write complete sentences that are found in my other packets. It would be great for those of you who teach Kindergarten who are beginning to teach sentence writing.

To begin with, students need to know:

• What a sentence is
• How to construct a sentence-Word order
• What parts does a complete sentence need to have
• Capitalization, Punctuation, Spelling rules
• Lot of words

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You can download these free Sentence frames by clicking on the image below: They are included in my packet and can be used for whole class instruction with understanding the parts of the sentence as you see in the image below the frames.

In my Valentines Writing Activities Packet students will learn the parts of the sentence using this example:

In order for students to write they need to:

• Have something to write about (Themes are great for this.)
• Know the vocabulary words needed to make a sentence.
• Read and listen to books being read to them about the topic.
• Talk about the books related to the topic.

I have included not only Word Wall Words but also Picture/Word Cards to help students become fluent with the vocabulary. Then students will participate in a whole group activity to make sure they understand what a sentence is and isn't before Making Sentences with Sentence Frames.

There are several other activities such as Unscramble, Write, and Draw as well as 3 different leveled Writing Assessments.

You can read the complete description by clicking on the image below. You can see sample pages of all the writing activities when you download the Preview file.

 

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November Poems and Free Activities

I can't believe that we are at the end of October! November is filled with wonderful holidays and celebrations. So I cooked up a November Poetry Unit with 10 original poems about Election Day, Veterans Day, Football, Native Americans, Pilgrims, Turkeys, and Thanksgiving.

Look at the poem below. There are so many ways to use this for teaching the 5 components of a balance literacy program.  It is the first poem in my new November Poetry packet. I see compound words, proper nouns, and plural nouns. You could also use it to teach syllables as there are 1, 2, 3, and 4 syllable words. There are lots of verbs and adjectives to find and short a words. Look at the words season and weather. Learning the different sounds of ea is a great phonics lesson. After learning the poem,  ask students about things that happen in November. This is a great way to check for understanding. As a writing activity, I included one in my packet.

Poetry is a great way to help students build fluency, even when you have struggling readers or ESL students. It is a great way to get all your students to participate. When students read aloud they develop expression, phrasing, and most of all fluency. For your struggling readers try  Echo reading.  First you read a line or stanza and then they read it. You can start by having students echo a line and then a stanza. Repeated reading helps develop fluency. You can also Choral Read the poems. Another strategy is Pair Unison. This is where the teacher and student read the poem together. You can also send the poems home so that parents can read them with their child. The more fluent they are the more confident they will be.

Here are the 10 original poems included in this packet.

Here are the Poetry Writing Activities in the packet. Students will write 3 different types of poems: A "How to be" Poem, A "5 Senses Poem" about Thanksgiving, and Acrostic Poems. There is one for Turkey, Veteran, and Pilgrim. When you download the Preview file you will see sample pages of all the Poems and many of the literacy activities for each one.

There are also 3 different literacy activities and Informative text, Opinion Piece, and Narrative Writing Activities with Graphic Organizers. If you would like to check it out please click on the image below.

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