teacher tips and tales: 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 Te acher'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.