Our New Writing Unit: Small Moments quickly

Since August we have completed several units in Writers' Workshop. We launched our independent writing program in August by drawing pictures of events from our lives, including both those at school and at home. We used storytelling and details in our pictures to communicate our ideas. Next we moved to adding labels to our pictures and finally a putting the labels into a sentence.

Our second writing unit focused on making lists of things that went together, such as colors and pets. Our third unit involved taking our lists and turning them into booklets using sentences with patterns, such as "I see the cat. I see the dog, etc."

For the first part of November we were busy writing poems using themes around colors, animals, Thanksgiving, and other topics that interested the children.

Up until now we have talked about how to put your ideas into your words, how to use picture clues to reinforce your writing, and to work neatly. We have learned to be brave spellers to include challenging words to tell our stories and to spell the 30 sight words correctly that we have added to our Word Wall.
Today we began our fifth writing unit, Small Moments. This unit is similar to the Launching Unit we began in August, but with increased expectations. This morning we reviewed how to write a story in Writers' Workshop. Then I demonstrated an example by drawing a picture and writing a sentence about  the math lesson we had early this morning. The children quickly chose topics and went off to write independently for 20 minutes. What a wonderful job our writers did! Great stories! Great detail in the pictures! Neat work! Everyone read their stories with partners and was very proud of their work. Jake was especially eager to read his story to the class with the document camera. Tomorrow the class will learn how to take one small event from their lives and how to turn it into a three page story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Our class is ready for this challenge! Awesome work! In addition, we will focus on having spaces between our words and including periods, question marks, and exclamation marks at the end of each sentence. The Small Moments unit will be great fun with much learning going on. It will continue through the end of December.

Friendship

An important part of kindergarten is for the children to learn to develop a wide range of skills for how to work and play with the many different personalities of their classmates. We want for them to make some close friends that they especially enjoy. Along with these friendships, the children will need to learn how to share, take turns, compromise, and develop empathy for their friends. They will need to exhibit kindness and helpfulness. Young children are naturally self-centered; but, to be a true friend, they will need to move beyond this and begin to think of the needs of their friends, too. How exciting it is to see our students learn what it takes to be a real friend.

But what about the rest of their classmates and their teachers? Do their feeling count, as well? Of course they do! Once a child has learned to consider the feelings of their friends, it is time for them to move forward developing empathy for their entire classroom community and then expanding into the world around them. How wonderful it is to see the class being considerate and respectful of others. In order to encourage the children to be inclusive to all their classmates, we have shuffled the table and carpet spots so that everyone is now sitting with new classmates. This changes the dynamics of the classroom atmosphere and allows for the children to establish new relationships. Some of these will blossom into new friendships as they work and play with different people.

As our children grow up, they will have an invaluable tool if they have learned how to develop positive     relationships with their peers, co-workers, bosses, neighbors, and family members. The old saying, "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten," has a lot of truth in it.

New Poetry Unit in Writers' and Readers' Workshops

We have concluded our writers' and readers' workshop units last Friday with completing our best work ever. For most of October we have been looking for books that included pattern sentences. These books have phases that are repeated throughout the story. The books with pattern sentences are fun to read and are very helpful for children who are beginning to read. Their confidence and success increases once the children have figured out the pattern.

For independent writing, the class has been making their own little books with pattern sentences. We started off with everyone making books about the classroom, using the sentence starter, "I see the ..." We brainstormed ideas and then the children used their kindergarten spelling to fill in the blanks. Next we moved to sentences about the playground, "I like the ..." Later the children selected their own topics. These varied from Halloween, birthdays, princesses, gardens, foods, toys, etc. The children were taught to stretch out their words for spelling phonetically, use spaces between their words, writing small and neatly, and adding details to their pictures. We also talked about using a variety of other sentence patterns, such as, "Here is the ...," "Look at the ...," Come see the ...," "This is a ...," etc. These sentence starters helped to introduce and reinforce sight vocabulary.

As part of Poetry in the Park, we will we reading and writing poems over the next several weeks. Each child will begin a book of poems. As a class we will read a poem on a chart together several times. Then the children will be given small copies of the poem to glue and illustrate in their  poetry books. We will practice reading these poems throughout the rest of the year, adding new poems each week. Our focus will be poems between now and Thanksgiving, but we will continue to read and write poems all year.

The poems we will be writing will revolve around familiar topics, such as, colors happiness, friends, myself, and using our five senses. Here is an example:

Happiness sounds like ...
Happiness looks like ...
Happiness smells like ...
Happiness tastes like...
Happiness feels like ...

We will first brainstorm as a class lots of ideas for each one. Then each child will select an idea that he or she like and record it on their poetry papers. Each of their poems will be illustrated and later compiled into booklets for their Bag of Books.

November will be a busy month of learning for all of us!