When we came back from Spring Break, we were in the middle of our opinion letter writing unit (I know, I still have not finished the story, but here’s the beginning again if you missed it!).  One of our first writing assignments was an opportunity to both tell me about their Spring Break AND test out their newly learned skills.  Double win, right? 🙂

Here are the directions I gave them:

Kiddos then spent several days planning and writing a letter that showed me their mad letter writing and convincing skills, and that included the most fun parts of their time away.  Unfortunately it took me a little while to get around to choosing a winner, but yesterday we finally sat down to crown the winner.  And the winner is….

It was SUPER hard to decide on the winner (there were two that it came down to and they were SO close!), but in the end, Millie’s letter had all the things we had be learning about: greeting, a stated opinion, 3 or more reasons, transitional words (like one reason is, another reason is, finally, closing, correct spelling and punctuation).  When I read it out loud, it was great to see (and hear) the reaction of the class–they could tell just by listening that it had all those parts.

And since it was a writing challenge, the prize was something to help make her writing even more spectacular–mini gel pens!

  I don’t use competition all the time, but sometimes it works to raise the level of excitement, engagement or even production.  And in this case it just made sense.  Way to go Millie, and other friends of Rm. 202 who wrote some great Spring Break letters!