1st Grade · Writing · L.1.2.A, W.1.1, W.1.3

Writing Lesson Plan for 1st Grade

A ready-to-teach writing lesson for 1st Grade, built around opinion, informative and narrative writing, personal narratives, friendly letters, describing poems, reading responses, the writing process, capital letters and sentences. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.

Approximately 45 minutes

Learning objective

Apply capital letter rules when writing original sentences
Practice starting sentences and names with capital letters
Edit own writing to ensure correct capitalization

Materials

Capital letters (the word I)
Capital letters in sentences - Set 1
Best School Lunch Opinion Writing
A Trip to the Zoo Narrative Writing
All About Bears Informative Writing
Plan Your Writing with a Web
Pencils, and whiteboard space for the modeled examples

Lesson steps

1. Notice it first (5 min)
Put two sentences on the board, one that uses writing correctly and one that does not. Ask students which sounds right before you name any rule. Noticing comes before naming.
2. Name the rule (I do) (8 min)
Now name writing and state the rule in one sentence. Write it where it can stay all week. Model correcting the broken sentence from the warm-up.
3. Fix them together (we do) (12 min)
Work through four or five sentences as a class. Mix in one that is already correct, because students who are pattern-matching rather than thinking will "fix" it anyway and reveal themselves.
4. Independent practice (you do) (15 min)
Hand out "Capital letters (the word I)". Students work independently. Circulate and watch for the students who can do the exercise but cannot explain the rule, since that gap shows up later in their writing.
5. Apply it to real writing (5 min)
Students find one place in their own writing folder where writing applies, and fix it. This is the step that moves the rule from worksheet to writing.

Check for understanding

Read the last two sentences of each student's independent work. Applying writing correctly in their own sentence matters more than getting the exercise items right.

Differentiation

Extra support. Students who stall: pull them into a small group and rebuild writing with concrete materials or a simpler text before asking for the written work again. Do not send the page home as homework, it will just rehearse the misunderstanding.

Extension. Students who finish early: ask them to write their own writing problem for a partner to solve, then check the partner's work. Creating a problem is harder than solving one and it surfaces whether they really understand writing.

Skills covered in this lesson

Capital letters · Sentences · Opinion writing · Narrative writing · Informative writing · Writing process · Reading response · Letter writing · Personal narratives · Poem writing

Questions teachers ask about teaching writing

What writing skills should first graders develop?

First graders should write opinion pieces with a topic sentence and a reason (CCSS W.1.1), informative texts with a topic and facts (W.1.2), and narrative pieces with a beginning, middle, and end (W.1.3). They should also use capitalization, spacing, and basic punctuation in their writing (L.1.2).

How much writing should a first grader produce?

By the end of first grade, most students can write several connected sentences (3 to 5) on a topic with appropriate spacing, capitalization, and ending punctuation. The focus at this level is on communicating ideas rather than length. Daily writing practice, even short journal entries, builds fluency faster than occasional longer assignments.

How do you help a first grader who struggles to write sentences?

Start with sentence frames (I like ___ because ___) that scaffold the writing structure. Use pictures to give the child something concrete to write about. Practice oral storytelling before writing, since children often have more to say than they can write. Pages with a drawing box and printed sentence starters on each row are good scaffolds for reluctant writers.

Do the 1st grade writing worksheets have answer keys?

45 of the 133 sheets have an answer key, including ten opinion, ten narrative and ten All About sheets and twelve of the eighteen writing process sheets. Most personal narrative, poem, letter, how-to, fact card and reading response pages have no key, because each child writes their own piece.

How should I use the three kinds of writing in 1st grade?

Rotate them. An opinion page asks what a child thinks and why, a narrative page asks what happened first, next and last, and an informative page asks for true facts about a topic. Mixing them keeps writing varied while building the structures in W.1.1 to W.1.3.