Has Anyone Seen my Snowman?

Well, my sweet students are busy bees right now with the end of the second nine weeks and the holiday break approaching.  It's difficult to believe that my precious students have almost completed half a year of third grade!

The past few weeks we've been practicing writing descriptive sentences and while my students are all about telling me HOW and writing one or two really fabulous descriptive sentences in isolation, having them utilize them in writing was not connecting.  So after a browse through Pintrest, I came up with the LOST SNOWMAN.

 I introduced my activity to my students by telling them that they precious snowman or snow-woman they had built in their front yard was missing.  They would be responsible for writing an ad describing the snow person in hopes of locating him or her.  My students were immediately enthralled.

We started off with a graphic organizer as a pre-write.  Students only wrote the descriptive words they wanted to include for the body, face & accessories.  We moved to our rough draft and students began outlining their thoughts in sentence and paragraph form.  After our peer conferences, students published their writing on snowman paper.

Pre-Write Graphic Organizer

Publishing

Friday afternoon we constructed our snowmen & snow-women.  It was an adventure! I die-cut three different sized white circles for students and laid out all sorts of construction paper. They went crazy!  The creative juices were flowing and it was fabulous to see them come up with interesting ways to build what they had written.

One Lost Snowman

I collaborated with one of the fabulous 2nd grade teachers down the hall and invited her class to come see if they could locate our missing snow-people.  Besides gibing my students a way to share their work, it also gave us an opportunity to practice being hosts & hostesses.  We stationed two greeters at the door that were elected by the class to welcome our guests and give them the matching sheets they would need. (Thankfully Mrs. Rodger's brought her own clipboards....being a first year teacher means at times, I still find myself lacking in some areas.) Each one of my students introduced themselves to the second grader and explained to them what we would be doing.  Hearing "Hi, my name is ________ & I'm so glad you're here." from my kids gave me a glow-stick moment on the inside!

The kids collaborated in reading what was written helping the second graders find other author's waiting to share and all around making sure all of our guests were taken care of.

All 22 Lost Snow-People

2nd Grade friend on the left with Author J!

Looking for clues in the writing.

Probably my favorite picture of the day.  This sweet student of mind rarely talks, but loved conversing with his new 2nd grade friends!

Finding the Snow-People

Afterwards we reflected on a class how the descriptions in our writing directly influenced whether or not the reader was able to correctly identify the snow-people.  The students made wonderful observations and comments of what they could have done differently on their snow-person and in the future show they would make sure to add detail in their writing!

Not only did we have a  blast, we were able to share with a different audience than normal, make some new friends and improve our writing.  I'll be binding our LOST SNOWMAN writing & the snow-people themselves into a classroom book for sure.  This is one activity that is a keeper.


Ms. B


P.S. The other positive to come out of this?  Mrs. Rodger's will be using the writing and picture of our snow-people in a literacy station for inferencing!