How To Kindergarten Reflection Sheet

I am going to be facilitating a study group with some of my primary teachers on writing volume. Before we start our study group we wanted to gather some data. The kindergarten students just finished a unit on HOW TO writing. 

We asked students... circle the page that looks like the writing in most of your books.  We could have had students make tally marks on the top (one child did this). Click here for sheet 

I wish we asked the students to reflect on what they learned as a writer (next time). 

 During the next unit of study we will be focusing on INCREASING writing volume. 

The Learning Progression chart below gives us some suggestions on how much writing our students should be doing. I know that when we look at this chart sometimes teachers are surprised by the volume expectation.  This will be one tool that we will use during this coaching cycle. The Learning Progressions comes from the Pathways book by Lucy Calkins. 

Looking at the reflections below we can set some goals for students. This was over the course of two bends. 

 This child may have been stuck on writing A LOT (filling up the whole page) in just one book. We want her/him to write less on a page (during the first bend) and make more books. During the second bend she can add more to her writing. 

This child is writing lots of booklets(hooray!). We need him/her to add more sentences.

Quick Reflection: Teachers found this reflection sheet helpful. It did not take the students a long time to fill in and it gave us some helpful information. 

Happy teaching!

Melissa 

How To Writing Teacher Toolkit

 A few people asked me to share my toolkit for kindergarten HOW TO WRITING. I would suggest creating a tool that works for you. I have played around with different ways to create a toolkit and the plastic binder works best for me.  

I'm going to share some of the pieces in my toolkit that I used with two kindergarten classrooms. Our work with the students focused on oral rehearsal, drafting text and shared writing. 

Shared writing is when the students orally rehearse the text and the teacher writes the words. 

❤️ Many of the tips for my toolkit have come from TC institutes I have attended over the years and Jessica Sauer who is an amazing staff developers at the Reading and Writing Project!

Anchor Charts & Checklists

At the beginning of my toolkit I have the anchor charts from the Teacher's College units, rubrics, and the checklists. The anchor charts help me see what the students will learn in this unit. If possible, it's great to do some shared writing before the units starts. Also, it is helpful to have some blank booklets. 

anchor charts 

checklists

 

Books on Deck

We learned from many TC workshops to have kids make book covers for BOOKS ON DECK. The students make the covers and store them in their folders. So, when they finish a book they will always have one on deck. I decided to bring my own BOOKS ON DECK covers to let the students decide what How To Topic we would write about. I made sure that all the possible topics were familiar with the students. ALSO, this is a great way to share some possible topics kids could write about.  

 

When I modeled this in a kindergarten classroom, we saw an uptick in topics related to the school day. Before my visit, many kids were making How to draw a rainbow, How to draw a heart etc., Modeling school topics made their text school HOW to books much more engaging. (we did shared writing in this classroom after the first bend of teaching)

Shared Writing 

The pieces on the right side were made during shared writing that can be used for conferring or small group. 

Below are some guided reading books (procedural text) I used for oral language rehearsal 

During small group time students created the text(orally rehearsed) and the teacher did the writing. Pages were photocopied for book bins. On different days we would reread and add more writing. 

Below is a photo copy version of the book used for shared reading. 

We learned HOW TO SNAP WORDS

I am OBSESSED with these small Post-its. I had students practice sentences using these words. We would put the little Post-its on pages.  For this shared writing text, I made the illustrations and the students used the pictures to orally rehearse the text. 

Pieces of Text made by the teacher for Small Group Instruction 

Spot the Difference??? What do we notice? 

The small group "marks up" the text. Students take out their writing and add to their illustrations. 

A tool we used for Elaboration (modeled during shared writing). 

Teacher made text to use for small group. 

Same text... different purpose

If there is something that you love in your teacher toolkit, I would love to hear from you! 

Happy How To's!

Melissa ❤️

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