Fall Writing and the Traits

I'm really loving teaching writing with the traits this year. My class is writing up a storm and I love hearing them use trait words as they talk about their writing. They will say things like: "I think I did a good job hitting the word choice trait in this piece." Love it when they start owning it!! This is my favorite resource for writing right now: I especially liked the rubrics included in the back of the book. Here is our writing reference wall. We really do refer to these writing targets a lot!

Recently, we worked on a descriptive writing assignment. I can't seem to find this page on my computer or I would certainly put it up for you all to use if you wanted. But you don't even need tht particular paper ...here is the process if you are interested: I gave them a choice of leaf cut outs to use for this. We have die cuts at our school and so I quickly cut leaves out in different shapes and fall colors. Then my kids had to imagine the leaf as something else and created a picture from it. Here are some of their creative ideas:

Next we worked on writing descriptions. We focused on word choice and I introduced the "Sound Effect Lead" as a way to begin this paragraph. I've gotten so many good resources from different people, it is hard to keep track. I do think I got this one from Beth Newingham's Scholastic Site. Her stuff is AMAZING! You must check her out! We also tried to use different senses and practiced including how things looked, sounded, felt, etc. in our description.

These replaced our Halloween writing. I thought they were so creative in their thinking!

I have added this file to my Teacher Pay Teacher store.  You can check it out by clicking the link below.

Imagining Fall