"Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much." Those words from Helen Keller sum up my feelings about this week in the Kindergarten Writer's Workshop. I am so lucky to be working with a group of teachers who are true collaborators, who are bold enough to step away from written plans to meet the needs of the writers in their classrooms, and who understand their students so well and bring that knowledge to our work together.
We began the week with a lesson on adding labels to the illustrations in our stories to help capture our meaning. We want to keep moving the kindergarten writers toward using letters and words to tell their stories. And some students are ready for scribing. We read Richard Scarry's The Best Mistake Ever (and Other Stories) to set the writers up for labeling.
After that first session on Monday, the classroom teacher approached me and wanted to do a lesson that she uses each year with her students. She wanted to incorporate a lesson that she values into what we were trying to do this week. So, on Tuesday this teacher taught a fabulous lesson on telling a story through pictures, and then adding labels to help readers understand the drawings. She talked about each picture as she added details, and she talked about them again as she added letters and invented spelling to the drawings. This repeated storytelling is a way for our young writers to capture their own stories. Finally, she showed her students how they could use the labels to write sentences to go along with the pictures. Golden!!
This student has used lots of letters and invented spelling to tell his story. He has also used vertical lines to separate the sequence of the events in his story.
You can see this student has labeled the "sun" and the "sou" (store). There is a clear sequence of driving to the store, shopping in the store, and then having dinner with what was bought at the store! Another teacher on the team was showing me her students' work and I noticed that instead of giving her writers small booklets of a few pages stapled together, she had simply taken strips of paper, marked 3 sections with vertical lines to represent beginning, middle, and end, and then copied them. Brilliant!!! This amount of white space was very appropriate and it nicely scaffolded the amount of writing her students needed to get on the paper. She understood the needs of her young writers far better than I, and she took that intuitive knowledge and made the work accessible for her students.
For this week coming up, we are going to do one more lesson on adding details to pictures in order to add meaning. I am going to read Freight Train, by Donald Crews to encourage the students to add lines and colors and shapes to their pictures. We will then revisit a favorite mentor text, Silly Lily and the Four Seasons, by Agnes Rosenstiehl to encourage our writers to go back to mentor texts for support as they write. We will end the week's lessons with The Best Story, by Eileen Spinelli to celebrate stories that come from the heart. And then we will have an author celebration to end our first unit of study! Every writer will have an opportunity to share his or her story with an authentic audience - their classmates and us!!! I simply can't wait! :)
Happy writing, everyone!! A quick sneak peak as to what is coming next....maybe an author study!!!
#allkidscanwrite
Happy writing, everyone!! A quick sneak peak as to what is coming next....maybe an author study!!!
#allkidscanwrite
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