Kindergarteners have been hard at work learning proper letter formation of lower and upper case letters, through writing instruction and practice. Body position: sitting or standing depending on the student and which works best for them, proper pencil grip, and paper placement in sync with one another is referred to as “Writing Ready!” in Kindergarten, all important to develop good solid writing habits across the curriculum.
Students learn the letter name, the sound it makes, and the formation simultaneously, allowing for easy application as they begin learning to be lifelong writers/readers. Developing these writing skills and applying the sound symbol relationship builds a strong foundation as students learn to express their thoughts through writing.
Intentional, consistent practice of writing sentences brings print awareness - words separated by spaces, capital, and lower case differentiation, appropriate capitalization use - beginning sentences and proper nouns, and punctuation - periods, question marks, exclamation points, commas, and quotes.
At the beginning of the year, students create narrative illustrations and label specific parts of their illustrations with the sounds they hear and know, this is invented spelling. Students apply some of the same strategies when learning to read, words and pictures match. Students' words and illustrations match too as they are learning to write.
Kindergarten writing focuses on narratives, opinions, fiction/fantasy, and creating a how-to book. Kindergarteners learn three steps in the writing process: Draft, Edit, and Publish.
Since we’ve returned to school we have been discussing peace, and what it means or feels like. Students gathered on the carpet around a writing chart as I shared my experience of peace and wrote it in a sentence, students then shared their experience, and what peace felt like to them as I transcribed their responses. In the first part of the draft process, students orally identified the topic and then went to their tables sitting/standing writing ready with paper and pencil continuing to draft. The editing process then began in teacher-guided small groups or one-on-one, checking for proper spacing between words, capitalization, punctuation, etc.Additionally, rigorous sight word works help students to write those words in sentences as they can be found on our word wall during the editing process checking for spelling. Furthermore, as the year progresses the student’s knowledge of letter-sound relationships robustly develops as does their vocabulary which translates into strengthening their writing skills. Editing is now complete! Students are ready to publish. Publishing is when students take all they learned during the editing process and re-write to create a final draft.
Sincerely,
Marina Olsen
Kindergarten Teacher