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Writing Minilesson: Feelings
Katrina Edwards uses read alouds as mentor texts for writing minilessons in her first-grade classroom. In this example she focuses on character feelings.
End-of-Year Read Alouds
Bitsy Parks explains how the ending weeks of read alouds in her first-grade classroom are designed to celebrate learning and shared experiences from the entire year.
Conferring in First Grade: Focus on Goals and Strengths
Katrina Edwards confers with first grader Wyatt about his goal of increasing the volume of his reading, helping him self-assess what’s going well and what lies ahead.
Minilesson: How to Retell a Story
Katrina Edwards uses the children’s books They All Saw a Cat and Be a Friend for a minilesson with her first-grade students on how to retell stories with a partner during reading workshop.
Fostering More Rereading in Classrooms
Stella Villalba explains why rereading is especially useful for young English language learners, and shares some simple strategies for integrating more rereading strategies into reading and writing workshops
Goals to Habits in First Grade
Bitsy Parks finds goals aren’t enough for her first-grade students—real growth requires that the goals eventually become habits. She develops a process mid-year to help children refine their goals step-by-step.
First-Grade Reflections: Looking Back to Move Forward
Bitsy Parks discovers that the best way to relaunch literacy workshops in January after holiday break is to have her first graders reflect on and celebrate what they learned in the fall with personal anchor charts.
First-Grade Conference: Stretching Writing
Katrina Edwards helps her adorable first-grade student Dylan stretch out his writing. He adds details by first talking about playing with friends near his home.
First-Grade Minilesson: Repeated Phrases
Bitsy Parks uses mentor texts and her own writing in a minilesson on how her first graders might use repeated phrases in their writing for more impact.
What Writers Need
Mandy Robek commits to two weeks of focused daily writing, and then translates what she learns about what writers need to classroom practice.
Big Picture to Close-Up Lens: Conferring with Kellan
Katrina Edwards confers with first grader Kellan about her love of the Danny book series, moving from a "big picture" discussion of patterns in the book and Kellan's reading strategies, to close-up decoding of individual words.
First-Grade Minilesson: Emotions in Writing
Katrina Edwards reads aloud a Kate Messner mentor text to build an anchor chart on emotions with her first graders.
First-Grade Reading Share: Connections
Bitsy Parks helps her first-grade students complete “thumb reflections” on making connections in reading early in the year by modeling connections from three conferences in a whole-class share session.
Visual Expectations in the Classroom
Heather Fisher finds the key to independence for many first graders is lots of visual reminders in classrooms.
First-Grade Minilesson: Tricky Words
Bitsy Parks presents a minilesson on figuring out tricky words by recounting a student's strategy from a recent reading conference, using it to begin an anchor chart.
Better Reading Partner Shares
Katrina Edwards leads a whole-class reading share session where the focus is on how reading partners work together to teach and not tell.
Writing Share Structures
Katrina Edwards moves her first-grade class out of a rut with writing shares by introducing many new options.
Lunchtime Storytelling
Katrina Edwards dreads lunchtime with her first graders, until she makes a conscious effort to build storytelling skills and share experiences more thoughtfully within the group.
Connecting Reading and Thinking Minilesson
Bitsy Parks uses read alouds from earlier in September to teach the key building block of comprehension—connections.
Conferring in First Grade: Reading Illustrations
Katrina Edwards helps a first grader use pictures to help her make sense of confusing text.
Connecting to Text: First-Grade Conference
Bitsy Parks confers with first grader Leo early in the school year, reinforcing the basic principle of making connections to text while reading.
Celebrating and Nudging: First-Grade Writing Conference
Bitsy Parks takes time to celebrate first grader Colson’s finished writing, even as she nudges him to try a technique shared in the day’s minilesson.
Joy
Katrina Edwards deals with a frustrated writer on the verge of tears in her first-grade classroom. She realizes the element that is missing in her writing workshop is joy.
Brave Writers
Katrina Edwards has her students think of something brave they did for a writing share session.
Stretching Writing in First Grade
Katrina Edwards helps first grader Lila stretch her writing about going to a park on a rainy day.
Building Relationships with Authors
Katie DiCesare is helping her students move from mentor texts to seeing authors as mentors through their websites and other digital resources.
First-Grade Minilesson: Reading Like Writers
Bitsy Parks teaches her first graders early in the year how to read like writers, highlighting examples from favorite mentor texts.
Lunchtime Talk Practice
Katrina Edwards preps her students for lunchtime chats with classmates to foster more social and conversation skills.
Building Excitement for Book Awards
Bitsy Parks finds building excitement for book awards works in tandem with generating enthusiasm for reading in her first-grade classroom.
First-Grade Conferring: A Two-Word Picture Book
Bitsy Parks shows how even the simplest picture book can lead to powerful conferring. In this example, a first-grade English language learner is reading a picture book that uses only two words in the text.
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