Throughout the school year, students will have the opportunity to write a variety of writing pieces, both fiction and nonfiction. We begin our year with our first unit of study, Building Good Writing Habits. In this unit, students will learn about the writing process. They will practice planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing their work. Crafting complete sentences is an important skill first graders learn this year. Writing should be able to convey ideas; therefore, it is important for writers to be clear and neat. Students will practice handwriting skills, finger spaces, capitalization and punctuation. Throughout the writing process, it is important that students collaborate with one another, share ideas, give feedback, and make appropriate revisions. This will teach them that writing is an ongoing process that takes time and patience.  

In addition, students will learn about the importance of adding details to their writing and using a variety of strategies to spell difficult words. It is important to note that first graders learn new words every day. It would very difficult for them to learn how to spell all of these words correctly. However, the most important words for writers to spell correctly are their word wall words (otherwise known as "sight words"). These are words that first graders should be able to read and write by the end of the year.  Be sure to see the list of these words in the Sight Words section of my webpage.