Kidwriting...

I love writing; however, I did not like writing as a child and writing during school was not fun. When I reflect upon why I did not like writing growing up it was because I was never allowed to write what I wanted and no one encouraged me to write creatively in school. Writing was all about grammar and writing to a specific prompt. I do believe it is important for children to learn to write to prompts, but not every time during every writing block how I was taught! I have taken my experiences of writing and used it in the positive and writing has turned into my FAVORITE thing to teach, along with math (I would say these two areas are tied)! When I think about the experiences I want for Kindergartners today, I want them to love writing, which I think they do. When I mention it is time for Writer's Notebooks...they have smiles on their faces and some even clap. I encourage children to take their experiences and write about it (using pictures or words). I use their writing to help develop the grammar compenents and sentence structure. I move around the room and give individual instruction to each child with their writing while focusing on a specific goal. For example, the goal might be to use a capital letter at the beginning and the rest lowercase. As I move around the room I talk to the children about their writing, but we look at the capital and lowercase letters.

I have spoken about Kidwriting in the past; however, I wanted to come back and revisit this idea. The children are beginning to develop a strong sense of the alphabet (letters and sounds). This is one of the things I love about writing because it encompasses reading too! They are able to hear the sounds and then write those on paper. If you notice your child writing at home or making stories, have them bring it into school and they may share it at the beginning or end of the day! I love seeing what the kids are doing at school.

Here is Mr. Harry explaining parts of Kidwriting...