Writing Transitions

I have to admit I am not the best writer, so teaching children to write is a bit of a challenge for me.  I have read MANY books on the subject and purchased many TPT packs to guide me.  However I like the children to write about what they are excited about.  I provide mini lessons to my students to help aide them as they write.

I get the ideas for my mini lessons as I observe them write when I walk around the room.  However I don't have an exact structure of what I am doing.  That is my goal with my writing folder this year to provide more structure to writing. 

One of the things I noticed  this past year about my young writers was that they tend to write pattern sentences.  So during Shared Reading for about a week I tried to find stories that had some good transitions for us to notice.   

I  found this poster on Pinterest and we made our own chart with the words we found...

source

I typed up something similar and added our words plus more I thought of and put it to their writing folders. It helped a lot to get the students to move beyond pattern sentences. 

However during conferences with the students I was struggling with them using the traffic light as our visual symbol.  I wanted them to visualize it more in terms of the story elements of beginning, middle and end.  So I transformed this idea into book terms and came up with this chart for their folders.

  
I am calling it storybook transitions because that is what the students are writing....stories.  I combined a lot of the transitions from the chart with what my students noticed in the books.  I think this will be a great resource for them in their folders.