The Important Thing

On the first day of school, we did our first writing project! We still need to edit some of these pieces, but for the most part they are finished. I like to start writing in the new school year with a pattern piece - it is not as threatening to children as handing them a pencil and asking them to write a story about anything they want, or what they did over the summer. With this type of project, children are first read a story that follows a specific pattern on each page, until they can predict what comes next. Then, when it comes to their own writing, each person is given page with blanks they they need to fill in. They can choose to fill the blank in with just one word! Often, during revising/editing, more words will get added - but at first, just getting something down on paper is what is important. (The Important Thing, so to speak.)

In this case, I read The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown. Each page describes various common entities like this:

The important thing about rain is
that it is wet.
It falls out of the sky,
and it sounds like rain,
and makes things shiny,
and it does not taste like anything,
and is the color of air.
But the important thing about rain is
that it is wet.

We then read The Important Thing about Margaret Wise Brown, which is an amazing picture book biography by Mac Barnett. 

Then we were ready to write our own The Most Important Thing About Me pieces. Here are two, which may or may not be ready for "publishing."