I’m thrilled to recap our elementary school family literacy night for you! We’ve been working really hard on aligning and strengthening our writing instruction over the years, so we decided to lean in on writing. During the event, we wanted parents to experience some of the writing tasks students work on in class, see the resources and language that we use, and have some takeaways that they can use to support writing at home.
I’m sharing everything with you!
- Click here to download a PDF that has a list of all stations, all of my notes, and links to all printed resources.
- Click here to view my Amazon list (commissionable) where I’ve linked all products that we purchased or used for this event.
Let’s get into it!
We held this event in our cafeteria. Each table had a different activity and a staff member to support. K-2 activities were on one side of the room and 3-5 on the other. Families moved at their own pace throughout!
Every student received a notebook and a pencil on their way in to use during the event and to take home at the end. Every notebook had our sentence checklist on the inside and Buddy (our mascot) on the outside.
K-2 Stations
I started with some phonics and spelling activities because writing words is the first step of writing! Our younger grades spend a lot of time on those important foundational skills, and we wanted parents to experience them.
I made sure to incorporate skills students were currently working on in class. For example, our 1st grade students were working on CVCe pattern words. (These mapping mats are free on TPT.)
Sorting sentences and fragments was trickier than I expected it to be, so families spent more time here than I anticipated having great conversations. (This resource is on TPT.)
I made sure sentences for dictation were fully decodable for each grade level and again included phonics skills students were currently learning. (The sentence checklist is on TPT.)
Squiggle stories were just for fun… because we simply don’t make enough time to write just for the fun of it! Many kids requested crayons for their pictures, but I didn’t provide any because I anticipated they would spend too much time at this station instead of moving throughout. They were excited to be able to take their notebooks home to complete their illustrations.
3-5 Stations
Again, we started at the word level for the older kids, because strong writing starts with solid foundational skills.
This is directly from a vocab curriculum we use called Vocabulary Surge from The 95 Percent Group. You could definitely achieve this with a similar morphology resource, though!
Lots of great conversations here!
We teach our kids to color-code their paragraphs for organizational and progression purposes. This strategy is used daily in classrooms, so it was very important to us that parents got to see it in action.
Our specific color-coding strategy is from a writing curriculum called Step Up to Writing by Voyager Sopris. I pulled sample paragraphs directly from the TE.
We’ve been working really hard this year on elaboration and evidence. (This resource is on TPT.)
I overheard lots of good conversations here, too! Students really had to pay attention to transitional words and phrases in order to put the essays together correctly. I created the mat inside the dry erase pocket more for parents to give them the language to use as they supported their children.
Peer revision is showing up on our high-stakes standardized test (Georgia Milestones) for the first time this year, so it’s been a big new focus for our 4th graders. I created this based on Milestones sampler information because I couldn’t find anything like it that already existed. (This resource is on TPT.)
I also did raffles throughout to encourage attendance and keep it exciting! I had different prizes for different grade bands. Here is the link to the Amazon list that has alll the supplies we used for this event.
Overall, it went so well! It was a lot of prep work, but I had a lot of help. The best part is that now it’s all in a box, ready for a much easier start next year.
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