Hands-On Experiences: Building Paper Planes
Hands-On Experiences: Making Maracas

Launching Workshop

Favorite Mini-Lessons
Transition Words
Favorite Mentor Texts
Throughout the week, I’m pulling from three of my favorite mentor texts – How to Babysit a Grandpa, How To Wash a Woolly Mammoth, and How to Teach a Slug to Read. These are perfect for showing students how real-author use how-to techniques (logical order, sequencing, time order words) to share a story or information with a reader.
How-To Writing within Work on Writing
As we start writing our How-To pieces independently, we’ll self-assess our writing and use the below checklist (personal ones and a class anchor chart) to guide our work.
In retrospect, this is a unit I’ll definitely teach at the beginning of the year. Teaching at this point of the year, is much simpler and requires less groundwork, but still, it’s a nice review of skills we’ve learned throughout the year in reading and writing. Plus, now that we’re officially readers and writers, it’s amazing to see what my students come up with!
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Great post!! Thanks for sharing your different books that you use. I enjoy the how to unit and will have to think about how to incorporate some of these ideas for next year!
Em
Curious firsties
Awesome ideas! Love introducing it with paper airplanes. That is a wonderful, hands-on idea. The math how-to task cards are perfect for integrating content into writing. Brilliant!
Meredith
Creativity to the Core
Do you have a list of other mentor texts you use? Great ideas!
These ideas are adorable! I can’t wait to do these next year!