A focus on writing

This is such an exciting time of year, as students begin using their understanding of letter sounds and words they know to write simple messages. In both the English and French class, we are focussing on some of the little techniques that make the writing read-able. So, we have started talking about how we use sentences (not just 1 or 2 word labels), we put spaces between the words, we use periods at the end of our sentence, words are written left to right, in a line and letters are formed using lower case letters. This is a lot to focus on, so we are doing some mini lessons. Today, the students used linking blocks to count and represent the number of words in a sentence. 

Christopher showing : "the cat is black"

I showed the a sentence with all the letters jammed together, no spaces between the words, and asked the to represent the sentence in blocks.

Of course, they used one block, but then when I read the sentence, they realized it was 4 blocks. They soon realized that the sentence required spaces between the words.  They were then given a squished sentence along with the book that the sentence had come from. 

The students then had to re write the sentence appropriately with spaces.