Seasons Anchor Chart & Writing Activity for 1st Grade
Spring time means a weather unit in first grade! I love making our weather unit about cycles because this is a big idea that you can make connections with outside of just the weather of science… like time cycles in math and circle story structures in reading. Within weather science, we can make cycle connections to the water cycle and the cycle of the seasons!
We are a few weeks into our 1st grade weather unit. We’ve already talked about the types of weather and touched on the water cycle. Next, we were ready to talk about the seasons and severe weather!
Seasons Anchor Chart & Shared Research
This week, we started researching seasons using our seasons anchor chart. We researched Winter and Summer this week, and will research Spring and Fall next week.
Unlike last year, I decided to chart categories for each season, like weather, fun, animals, and people. Then, we charted the details for each season within categories. It kinda turned out like a spider web. And this actually was for a more important reason other than my OCD… 🙂
Seasons Informative Writing
We’ve been doing informative writing for a while. And while most of my firsties could write an informative paragraph in their sleep, their detail sentences are quite random.
Like this…
So, we’ve been focusing on grouping related detail sentences together instead of randomly writing 3 disconnected details about a large topic. Having a “categorized” anchor chart REALLY helped. We were able to easily see during share time who had facts from all over the place versus kids who wrote all of their details about weather together and animals together, and so on…
During share time, we highlighted and color coded the related details.
And while my lower writers didn’t quite get this independently, my on and higher kiddos did really, really well. And now I can totally see how much easier the transition to writing multi-paragraphs will be for these kiddos!
Where Can I Find This Seasons Anchor Chart & Resources?
You can find all of the materials for my 1st grade weather unit, including templates for a seasons anchor chart in this weather unit for first grade.
