1st Grade Writing about the Past

First graders at Trevvett Elementary have been learning about life in the past in History (SOL1.1) and how to write complete sentences with capitals and punctuation in English (SOL1.13e). Today students in Ms. Fletcher’s class showed off their skills by writing sentences about the past. We used ABCYa! Storymaker because it has a familiar writing paper template and an age-appropriate font. The students got to the website all by themselves by typing “ABCYa” in a Google search, clicking the link, then clicking the 1st grade button, and finding the Storymaker link on that page. First we discussed different ideas they could write about so they weren’t all writing about the same thing. We talked about how they cooked on a fire, traveled using horses and wagons, washed clothes in a bucket or the river, went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, sent letters instead of texts, and many more ideas. The students typed their sentence about the past using Shift to make a capital at the beginning and remembering their period at the end. We encouraged them to use sight words and sound out any unknown words (SOL1.12c). Then they used their newly-learned click-and-drag skill to draw a picture illustrating their sentence. When they were finished we saved them as PDF files (click the Print button). Finally we helped them upload their files to a Padlet (a free online bulletin board). You can see them all here (click each one to view the whole page).