[Painting a Picture with Words] sentence writing activity

Well. . .good morning!

It's a cold and rainy morning here in Utah.

Not exactly the gorgeous spring weather I was hoping for, lol, but we'll survive.

Jenny asked how I created the bubbles on the Brain Busters Challenge sheets.

Simple unicode.  If you click here, you'll be whisked away to Alan Wood's Enclosed AlphaNumerics Unicode cheat sheet page.  Then you can make bubbled letters, too!  :)

It's been an interesting week in my classroom.

My littles haven't been naughty, nor have they been really good.

It's been some weird strange combination of the two.

I know.  I don't get it either.

I rearranged desks yesterday.

That helped.

But. . .today is cold and rainy.

Ha!  Interesting indeed.

We've been working a lot on writing at our school.

Starting with the whole writing process, the 6+1 traits, writing plans, types of writing, forms of writing, handwriting, and expanding sentences.

Expanding sentences.

Sounds like fun.

No?

Yeah, I know.  I was having a hard time making it exciting in my classroom, too.

This week we've been doing one of these little activities each day.

On Monday I had every student complete the drawing and simple sentence part.

Tuesday and Wednesday we completed a page and displayed them in the hall.

The best part is, I KNOW they're starting to understand because when we're reading a book, they say, "That sentence needs a WHEN!" (or a WHERE/HOW/WHY/WHAT/WHO!).

Makes me smile.

(Although I really wish they wouldn't just blurt it out, lol).

I have seen some improvement in their journaling also - sentences are becoming longer and more interesting, more thought is going into each sentence.

Yep.  Makes me smile.

Anyway. . .(I'm rambling)(I'm tired)(My fingers are frozen from taking puppy out to go potty). . .the image is linked to the pdf download which includes the instructions and the work page.

You can say thanks and warm my little grinch heart if you feel like it.  ;)

Some have been having issues downloading the handwriting lines if they have a mac.

Not sure why.

So. . .I didn't use a handwriting font.

I just used lines and a dashed line - although the dashed line didn't look too dashed in the pdf file.  I did make it grey instead of black, so it will copy a little lighter.

If you have a mac and have had trouble, please let me know if this format works better - if the lines actually show up when you print.  Thanks!