The Purple Parade

1st Grade Writing "No Excuses" List With Common Core right around the corner we decided as a first grade team to create a "no excuses" list for grammar.  Some of us teachers conducted school visits and learned that one particular school who uses the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for writing (like we do) created "no excuse" lists to accompany the writing instruction.  The one thing that the units of study lack is grammar instruction.  The grammar lessons are supposed to be embedded into the writing lessons.  Although we do that, we were noticing that students were still not following the basic grammar rules.  So, we created a "no excuses" list for students to use to check their work.  Each child will get a copy to keep in his/her writing folder.  In addition to the list, I created a chart as a visual. I got the idea for the chart format from a chart I saw on Pinterest on capital letters.  My chart includes capital letters, ending punctuation, a

Today, my son (who's in 2nd grade) learned a valuable lesson... " save early, save often ".   He loves history and has been on a pirates kick for awhile now.  He was even a pirate for Halloween.  He's been reading and rereading the same book about pirates for months. Today he decided to make a book about pirates. He got on the iMac and started typing in an old version of Microsoft Word for the Mac.  It is not a very good program, but it's pretty easy to use for a 2nd grader.  He was almost done when all of a sudden, the program crashed.  He didn't know what had happened.  I asked him if he had saved his work, but he said "No."  The tears started to well up in his eyes.  My heart was breaking for him.  He had worked so hard for hours on this book.  He could've been playing on the Wii or watching TV, but instead he was reading up on pirates and making a book about it.  I reopened the program to see if I could save it.  The program had recovered th