Mystery Mail

My grade 1 partner and I have been working on writing letters as well as the concept of inferring.  I found this amazing unit on Teachers Pay Teachers, and this past week I tried it out with my kiddos.  It was such a success!  Pick up the original Mystery Mail Unit on TPT from the Clutter Free Classroom.

The first step was to find some people in the school to 'send' the mail to our class.  I asked our gym teacher, the library clerk, and the principal.  Here is what our library clerk sent us:

Object #1: bandaids (from the time she spends in the office)
Object #2: a ruler (for choosing books in our library)

Object #3: a photocopy of her favourite book, Giraffe and Bird

Next, the students needed to use their 'inferring skills' to explain why the mystery mail person would send the objects they did.  Their next step was to fill in the graphic organizer provided in the pack to explain their thinking using some of the sentence starters on the anchor chart.  Here are a couple of my 'stars' working hard to complete the graphic organizer.

This proved to be a super engaging activity for my reluctant writers because they all wanted to guess who sent the mail to us.  When they were done with the graphic organizers, I read them the letter that was sent with the objects.  It was one of the highlights of our day.

I've made the anchor chart available on my Teachers Pay Teachers store for FREE, so head on over there if you want to download a copy to make for your own class!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reading-Strategy-Poster-Inferring

À bientôt, mes amis!