Just as most of you probably do, I begin every single day of school with a morning meeting. I take five minutes to allow students to tell me anything their hearts desire before the day gets started, and we always read my morning message. On every morning message, I always include a "brain buster." These brain busters include review of math skills we had been learning about, spelling words, CVC words, rhyming, syllables... literally every skill is covered as review on my brain buster. One of the most difficult skills we cover on our brain busters are our "fix-it sentences." I don't typically begin these on our brain buster until after Winter Break when I feel that my students have had enough practice with learning the basic fundamentals of writing a sentence; for us in my kindergarten class we chop the fundamentals of a sentence pretty much up to the following: a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, punctuation mark at the end, and checking for correct spelling (of simple words, of course!). I had been giving a little bit of thought about how I could get each of my students to practice these fix-it sentences several days a week because when we do the sentences in our brain busters, only a handful of students get to participate each time, and of course the same students are the ones who always volunteer to participate and the rest just about refuse to get up in front of the class to write on the board. I'm sure this is not a new problem to any of you.
So along with this dilemma, I had also been noticing during our writing time that a lot of my students are having problems with small things when writing their sentences such as spacing in between words, nice penmanship, and correct formation of letters. This is very troublesome to me because their writing has been improving and the small things take away from the words that they are correctly able to spell now and their ability to even put their thoughts down on paper. I want their writing to be as wonderful as I know it is, and with practice, I know they will all fix the small things. So, by putting these two dilemmas together, out came this idea.
My Spring Fix-It Sentence Notebook is seriously perfect and just what I wanted needed.
We will alternate between this notebook and our writing journals during writing time, so the thirty spring related fix-it sentence pages that are included in this notebook will be plenty to get us through until the end of the school year.
We did our first fix-it sentence together as a class today, and, if it could, my heart would have been smiling.
Each fix-it sentence page of this notebook has three steps: 1. Fix it. 2. Rewrite it. 3. Draw it.
For our first time, we did step one together. I then had students complete step two on their own, and I checked their work before they could move on to step three.
{Here is a sweet girl working on step two, rewriting the sentence the correct way, using her "space man."}
{Here is a completed fix-it sentence page in the notebook. This little lad did a fabulous job! His penmanship, although hard to see because of his needed-to-be-sharpened pencil, was perfect, and he rewrote the sentence perfectly. He also drew a picture for step three that matched what the sentence said.}
This activity took every bit of twenty minutes, but it was my favorite part of the day. I turned on Kidz Bop after I allowed everyone to begin working independently working on steps two and three and was able to walk around and work with individual students to the sweet sounds of my Kinders singing and working. It just doesn't get any better than that!
If this is something that you think would be great to prepare your Kinders for 1st Grade, I posted this product in my Teachers Pay Teachers store today and have it for 50% off until April 2nd. You can click on any of the pictures above to go see it and get more information on it in my store, or you can click here.
