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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

First Grade Interviews

One of my favorite writing activities is when the children interview each other. They learn so much about asking and answering questions, keeping it relevant, sentence structure, working collaboratively, and so on and so on. There is never any complaining about all the hard work that goes into planning, drafting, and publishing an interview piece.

First, the children are assigned random partners. 
Then, they ask each other questions and record their answers.



Actual conversation between Jonathan and me after I read his "juggling with one ball comment"...

Me: Juggling with one ball? Sounds a lot like throwing up a ball and catching it.

Jonathan: Yeah, it is. It's kind of boring, but I'm really good at it!

LOL! I love when children think outside the box!

Then each student meets with me and we fix some of the errors.
Finally, they are given the final writing template and they publish their interviews.



(Love the tilapia and fries!)


"Likes to fit in small spaces!" 
Love the creativity in George's answer!

Once all the interviews are written, I bind them into a book and it becomes our newest favorite book to read. Students whose siblings have been in my class love to read all about their brothers and sisters.


If you would like to have your students conduct interviews, you can find the interview question sheet here. It's part of my writing station activities. This pack includes question sheets that are very basic, for beginning writers. Next week, my kindergartners will be conducting interviews too.



And you can find the interview writing templates here.


This second pack allows you to choose the questions the children ask each other and comes with 96 different questions and 6 different writing templates.

I hope you decided to give interviews a try!
I promise your students will love it!

4 comments:

  1. This is awesome! I laughed out loud at the juggling with one ball comment. SO CLEVER!!! Kids are the best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love this, Lori!

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    1. Ha! Thanks so much Lyndsey! It was definitely a laugh out loud moment for Jonathan and me!

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  2. Oh my stars!!! How cute are these?!! I love the description of what George does in his spare time! First graders are too funny! Aw, I only wish I had seen this earlier this year. I would have loved to make this class book with my first graders this past year. (I had some real characters this past year!) Definitely putting on my list for next year! Thanks so much for sharing! ;)

    Kindly, Theresa
    http://firstgradeissweet.blogspot.com/

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    Replies
    1. Thanks so much for the kind words Theresa! They certainly were a lot of fun!

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Thank you for taking the time to comment. I love to read them!

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