Can you persuade the teacher?

This week we began our persuasive writing unit. We first started reading the book, Hey Little Ant. The students enjoyed this book quite a bit.  It's about a boy and whether or not he should step on an ant. Of course, I had a student tell me there was an ant on me and when I went to look she yelled, "April fools!" She totally got me! Let's just say after that I had several "ants" appearing throughout the day! :) 

Our next persuasive writing was a lot of fun. I got the idea from this blog: 

http://mssinclair.blogspot.com/2012/05/oreo-persuasive-writing-anchor-chart.html?m=1

I asked the students if they thought I should give them a cookie before lunch. They then had to write a letter trying to persuade me one way or the other.  Some were pretty convincing, and I feel for all those parents who hear their pleas every day as they are pretty good! :)  Check out some of the writings and the charts we used below:

Writing Offices

The students and I are loving one of our new centers.  It's Candy Land! Don't worry it's Sight Word Candy Land!  I found the idea of course on Pinterest and totally lucked out because I bought a Candy Land rug game at a garage sale two summers ago.  I asked my fantastic parent volunteer to make the cards and POOF! What a fun way to practice sight words!  I know other teachers have done letters/sounds with it also.  You could do so many different things with this!  I found the idea here. 

I'm so excited about another new center.  It's "Writing Offices."  Each student has their own notebook to practice writing sentences.  Later I want to open it up to writing letters, postcards, books, etc.  Each writing office has an ABC Chart, our writing check list, sentence starters, and sight words.  The students were so excited about using the "offices."  Another fun thing I added this year was our spaceman sticks.  I saw this idea in a catalog you could order sticks shaped as spacemen so I created my own to put on Avery address labels!  Get them here!  The kids love when I purposely leave out a space on my Promethean Board and we say, "Have no fear! Spaceman is here!"