Publishing Student Writing

In my first/second grade classroom, I have been using the Portland Public Schools writing curriculum for the past two years. I have found it to be really effective! The lessons are thorough and cover writing strategies and grammar concepts in a developmentally appropriate way.

At the end of each unit of writing, we have a celebration where I type up their stories and we share them with partners, Author Groups, or whole-group. This has become a really exciting and important day in my students' writing lives. But it has been a struggle for me!

I have always wanted to type their stories into books, but I never knew an easy way to do it. I would type them on Word, trying to make mini-books and just guessing where the middle of the sheet of paper was. Today, though, I found an easy way - and I want to share it with you in case you do this, too!

{Disclaimer: I have a Mac, but I use Office. I'm guessing that Office has the same features regardless of computer, but I don't know for sure... so if it doesn't work on a Windows computer, I am sorry!!}

First, go to File and Page Setup. You should get to a screen that looks like this.

Choose 5.5x8.5 for your paper size and landscape for your orientation. This will give you a perfect half sheet to type your stories on!

Then type, type, type away. Save your stories as a PDF and open the PDF in Preview. Go to print them.

Where it says "Preview", change it to "Layout" and then choose 2 pages per sheet.

Print the stories and cut them on your school paper cutter at the 5.5" mark. Staple them and make an adorable little book!

We're all looking forward to celebrating our author status tomorrow! Let me know if this is any help to you or if anything is unclear! :)

Starboard!!!

A while back, I mentioned that my principal had ordered some interactive whiteboards for our school and one was for me!

I now present my new best friend!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamazing. Before today I didn't even have an overhead in my class. This is a big deal in my life.

Basically we played on it all day in between doing stuff we REALLY HAD to do. Only Scholastic News games though!!! All CCSS aligned. :)

I haven't actually used the software yet that came with it (it's a Starboard) and it seems sort of confusing. I'll figure it out though!

Moving on, in first grade we are learning how to add and today we worked on number stories!

We were only technically supposed to be learning how to write a number sentence based on a word problem, but they really wanted to draw out the problems. Definitely doable!

Do you like our little chalkboards? In Scholastic News this week, we learned that "long ago" kids wrote on slates with chalk. It made me laugh because I have a whole stack of these bad boys in the closet and the kids love them!! Not to mention the erasers I made. :)

And last, today I gave the first graders an emergent reader that I downloaded from Mrs. Wills. They went crazy over it! Our reading program is designed to be very challenging, which is fine for my high students but painful for anyone who doesn't read way above grade level. My kids felt so good and confident to be able to read the emergent readers! On the back page, they had to write something that they like to do, and I felt really happy when saw this:

I like to gow to the porc! Otherwise spelled as "go to the park", haha. Anyway, I feel absolutely PUMPED that my first graders are applying letter sounds to write phrases!!!!!! I think Writer's Workshop is paying off big time!!

What I'm Loving Wednesday

Happy Wednesday! It was our first full day of school!

I have a lot to love today. :)

I'm loving that I have a pretty good class this year! They are super chatty and I need to get that in check, for sure, but overall they are very sweet kids. I don't foresee any major behavior problems this year.

I'm loving that one student who particularly challenged me last year has transformed into a wonderful little man. He always tried to be good, so it was hard to get TOO frustrated with him, but had some impulse control difficulties. I hardly recognize him this year! I love his parents for working so hard with him all summer. :)

I'm loving my new girl. New kids are really rare at school, but I have one in first grade and she is the cutest. She is incredibly shy and nervous around the other kids, but she wants hugs from me all the time and just generally brightens up my day. She is loving school this year (the TOTAL opposite of her Kindergarten experience) and I feel happy that I am helping her have a good experience!

I'm loving that yesterday, when we talked about stamina, one boy said he had a lot of stamina for eating. Haha!

I'm loving that today my first graders asked if they could read when they finished their work early! YES! Pleeeeease read!

I'm loving that we launched Writing Workshop today! Everybody was incredibly excited to write, even though 75% of them wrote about their dog (like I did in my model story). When time was up and some kids weren't finished, they begged to finish tomorrow. I laughed to myself and said, "Yes! Of course we will have time to finish tomorrow!" And the next day... and the next day... and the next day...

I could probably think of a million more things, but it's probably past my bedtime!! What are you loving today?