Hip Hip Hooray! I have to Celebrate!

I have to do some celebrating this week and let me tell you why....I have always had a hard time with helping kids to constantly remember to start with a capital letter when writing a sentence.  I would always talk about it and when I ask, "How do you start a sentence?"  they could always recite back to me, "with a capital letter".  But, when it came down to it, the capital letter was forgotten a lot.  

This summer I was looking for ideas to help with this and I came across these cute writing goals anchor chart posters at Made by Lucy De Nio on TPT.

I decided to attach them all together and put clothespins with the kids names on them.  I told them that they were all starting with the first goal of starting sentences with capital letters.  They knew that whenever they were writing, I would be checking to see if they started their sentences with capital letters.  The kids were so excited about this because they knew that once I saw that they were doing this often, then they would graduate from this goal and move on to the next goal.  I am happy to say that the majority of the students graduated this goal and are now working on ending sentences (without reminders).  I did tell them that they still have to remember to capitalize or they would have to move back up the chart and redo that goal.  

When they graduated from the goal, I gave them the following certificate that I found at http://www.uniqueteachingresources.com/english-award-certificates.html

I have one of my students that is going to be graduating this goal this coming up week and all last week he kept saying "I am always going to remember to capitalize at the beginning of a sentence and I keep reminding myself of it every time I start a sentence because I want to graduate that goal really bad".    :-)

So, I am celebrating because I have found something that has helped my kiddos to always remember how to start a sentence and I don't have to remind them every time we write.  YAY!

On another note, I wanted to share some pics of my cat's new favorite place to lay (what a smart kitty cat!)

Laying and praying on the holy bible.  :-)

Have a great week and wonderful Thanksgiving!