Write Right!

A teaching book

Kindergarten is such a great grade level because the range of skills and abilities is so fun to work with.  Some students may be fantastic readers but may need help with art.  Some may struggle to count but be amazing athletes.  Each student in my class has such great talents but also such great areas for growth.  This gives us an amazing opportunity to watch ourselves learn and grow through the year of kindergarten.  The students in my classroom in February are completely different from the ones that entered in August and we love to celebrate that!

Spelling challenging words

One area that can give all of us a challenge is writing.  Whether we are talking about penmanship, grammar, or spelling; writing is one tough skill to master!  In kindergarten we start to lay the foundation for all of the writing skills we will need in our future.  For the past several weeks our writers have been working on writing for readers.  There have been many skills we have focused on

We have been carefully considering the purpose of our writing.  Are we looking to entertain or inform our readers?  Teaching books and story books are very different, and we want our writing to reflect that.

Writing questions

We also have been working to make sure our writing is legible and makes sense.  Part of this is carefully considering our spelling of words.  If they are sight words or we have a reference in the classroom, can we carefully copy or remember the correct way to write that word?  If the word is unknown can we use our skills with phonemes to chop up or sound the word out?  I love when students challenge themselves to write several unknown words.  They do a great job identifying the sounds they hear and transferring that to paper. 

One new challenge we've added is punctuation.  We are experts on when to use periods, but lately we have been working to add questions or exclamations to our writing.
After several days of writing I staple our pages together to create a journal.  I like to leave comments on ways the writing has improved or suggestions to keep the growth going.  It's great to see how the writing has gotten better even over the the course of just a few days.