Celebrating Young Authors

We would like to welcome a guest blogger to our Literacy Land today: Maria from Curious Firsties. She is a first grade writing teacher.  That's right!  She teaches four 70 minute blocks of WRITING each day!  Needless to say, she has a passion for our young writers!

Thanks for joining us today, Maria!

Writing is a beautiful thing.  Can we get an amen to that?!  We are so blessed to be able to watch this process unfold in our young firstie writers.  After weeks, I mean WEEEEEKS, of sketching, writing, conferencing, sharing, conferencing some more and then finally choosing a piece to take to publication, our firsties are in need of some type of reward for their efforts. 

So we reward them with a PARTY!  And, who doesn't love a party?  Our firsties LOVE being able to share their work with families, friends, other students, teachers, and even our principal!  We love the look in their eyes when they are reading a piece THEY wrote and illustrated.  We love how empowered they feel as authors. 

Here's the fun part of celebrating authors..... THE CELEBRATIONS!  We have celebrations for just about every author we study in our writing class.  We like to mimic authors such as the GREAT.........  MO.WILLEMS. (in my best Jimmy Fallon voice)




We love keeping our decorations simple and cheap.  :) 


Next up....  Jane O'Connor
 After reading all about Fancy Nancy, we have a celebration to read our "How-To be Fancy/Handsome" to our parents.  Our firsties get all dressed up in ruffles, pearls, and suits.  For those who "forget" because sometimes that happens, we have our own Ooh La La Beauty Spa!  Here we give out mustaches, paint fingernails, tie bows in the girls hair and give the boys bowties!  It has been a BIG hit the last two years!
 Our next big celebration is for all our nature enthusiasts!  This year we added a SAFARI WALK to our research celebration. We think this was a student favorite.  Of course inspired by Pinterest we set up our classroom like this...




 And for this coming school year we have a few more celebrations in the works, but parties will not be on the top of that list. Instead, we will focus on one goal. We will be celebrating author accomplishments daily!  We are great about using our words to tell them how they are doing, but we'd like to take this a step further!  Our newest way to celebrate authors is by giving them bracelets!
Not only will our firsties love them, but our parents will also be informed about what their child is doing well at in writing class. :)  Two birds. One stone. :)

The inspiration for this came from my own girls.  They LOVE, LOVE, LOVE bracelets.  My oldest loves them so much she never takes them off.  She told me, "Mom, it's a part of me." That's when I thought..... hmmmm.... How can we do this in our classroom?  Bracelets.For.EVERYONE! 



These bracelets to encourage your young authors can be wrapped around a wrist,

                                    Put on a backpack,                   or on a lunchbox.
The possibilities are endless.  :)

Here's to an AMAZING year of growing young authors!


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwZ2gCKHv0o7YzNfbVFBS252T3M/edit?usp=sharing
Click on the picture for your bracelet FREEBIE!






Maria from Curious Firsties

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