First graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning about goods and services (SOL1.7) and -ing words (SOL1.6e). So today students in Ms. Wimmer’s class wrote sentences about people who provide services, and we used -ing words to describe their work. First we reviewed some of the services they’ve been learning about: firefighters, policemen, barbers, teachers, doctors, etc. Then we talked about action words that end with -ing to describe what these community helpers do: helping, teaching, cutting, etc. (A great site to review services is Scholastic’s Listen & Read. It has several short articles about various services which can be read aloud). Next we used ABCYa! Storymaker to write and illustrate our sentences. The students used the paint tools to draw a picture of the service, then they wrote a complete sentence starting with “He/She is” and ending with an “-ing” word describing what they do. We took a screenshot of each student’s work (using the Snipping Tool) and uploaded them to CoMemories. You can see them all here.

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).