Friendly Letter Writing

Throughout the year, first graders have been working on a variety of writing projects.  We have written personal narratives, a class story about our Hudson Hike, as well as short pieces about our lives.  Our latest project is a friendly letter!  We began by reading some stories with letters in them to become familiar with the format.  Our morning message has also started being written as a letter!  In small groups, we wrote letters to the kindergarten and fifth grade to practice what we learned from the books.  Then we were ready to start our own.

We follow the writing process with each project.  First we do some brainstorming (those letters we wrote together), then we begin drafting:

We have also been working on using our resources as we draft.  Kayla and Michelle are looking at a “personal word wall” which each student has in their journals.  Franco has the word “favorite” taken down from the classroom word wall for his letter.

Weaver is writing about his transportation project and so he took out his transportation folder to spell “horse and carriage”.

Alex is getting ready for the next step of the writing process: meet with a teacher.  During this stage, students check their own work one more time and then they will sit down with a teacher to get help with spelling and fix any grammatical errors before they write their final draft.

After meeting with a teacher, they get a new piece of paper to write their final, focusing on making changes and writing neatly and carefully.  The last step for this project will be addressing and envelope and delivering it to the classmate they wrote to!