California Our Golden State

This week we have been learning all about California and our state symbols.  The students created these wonderful projects and wrote super paragraphs to go with it.  As you can see from the picture we use colored dot stickers to help with paragraph organization.  We follow this format:  Blue -hook, catch your readers attention.  Green -topic sentence, tell what your writing is all about.  Yellow -star idea, a detail about your topic.  We are just starting to incorporate, Red -stop and support your detail with further information.  (Each paragraph needs at least three star ideas.) Finally, Green -conclusion sentence.  We use green again here because I teach the students to go back to their topic sentence and restate it a little differently.  The kiddos are really getting the hang of paragraph writing.  I have found that using a consistent format takes out so much guess work that leads to writers block.  The picture also illustrates this student's fine use of the thesaurus.  "Let me convey to you about remarkable California." Love it! Way to go!