Writing in kindergarten is something else, especially at the beginning of the year. It is one area where nobody really tells us HOW to teach it. And several ELA curriculums have kindergarteners writing sentences or even opinion pieces in the first month of school. And we all know…that is not realistic! When there are students coming to school that have never even used crayons or don’t know how to hold a pencil, those expectations are too high.
That’s not to say that kindergarteners shouldn’t be able to write multiple sentences and detailed stories at the end of the year. They are totally capable of that! But we need to provide developmentally appropriate instruction that is going to meet them where they are at, and guide them to the end result!
Pre-Writing Skills
Before children can even begin to learn to write, we need to make sure they have strong pre-writing skills. During the first few weeks of the school year, I focus on strengthening fine motor muscles with things like play dough and other hands-on activities. Then, we do lots of practice with tracing so students can get familiar with using a variety of writing utensils.
Learning To Draw
A big part of writing and telling stories in kindergarten is through pictures. But, at the beginning of the year, many students don’t know how to draw. And just like any other skill, they must be taught how. So, I go very slowly, step-by-step, and teach them how to draw. First, we learn how to draw different facial expressions and hair styles.
Then, we learn how to draw people (that actually have a body). We also practice drawing several other basic things that students may need to draw in their stories, such as animals, a car, a house, etc. I prefer to do these through directed drawings. Even though this feels like it is unrelated to the standards, it is so important to teach young children. It really grows their confidence and prevents them from saying “I don’t know how to draw that.” or “Can you draw it for me?” in the future.
Telling A Story With Pictures
Once students get pretty good at drawing, then we move on to the story telling aspect. Again, we can’t expect children to be able to write a story with words, unless they can do it with picture first. And this is also something that must be explicitly taught.
Often times, we ask our students to “add more details” to their pictures. But what exactly does that mean? How do they know what to add? This is why, I teach my students exactly what details their pictures should include from the beginning.
Their stories should have…
–A Setting: This tells where their story happened. Was it inside or outside? Was it during the day or at night? What was the weather like?
–Characters: This shows who was there in the story. This can include people or animals.
-An Action: This tells what was happening in the story. Were they play basketball? Were they riding in the car? Were they eating dinner?
By teaching students to include these components in their stories, they automatically become so much more detailed. Then, if I want students to add more details, I can easily ask guiding questions to get them to add more.
The next step in the writing process, is learning how to label. This is where students begin to write letters and form words, which will eventually help them in learning to write sentences. I start by teaching what exactly a label is.
By this point in the year, I have introduced most or all of the letters and sounds to my students. So they are pretty good at naming initial sounds of words. So naturally, we move to labeling things in their pictures with the initial sound.
Then, as we start getting into phoneme segmentation, we learn how to stretch and sound out words. I always remind my students that kindergartens do not have to worry about spelling words correctly. Their job is to write the sounds they hear. So leaf might look like “lef”. As they start labeling their pictures, some students might be able to sound out whole words and some might still only get the initial sound. Both are totally okay. As they practice more, the better they will get at it.
Writing Sentences
Finally, we start learning how to write sentences. As this point we are usually a couple of months into the school year. Now that students have had a while to become more familiar with text and sounds and understanding that words make sentences, I find it so much easier to actually teach sentence writing.
To start, we work on learning what a sentence is and how to write one. We do this through fill in the blank activities, sentence scrambles, and sentence building activities.
Next, we discuss how sentences tell about our pictures that we draw. So, the words must make sense and match what the picture shows.
After students get comfortable writing sentences independently, then I teach correct sentence structure. We practice things like spaces between words, capitalization, and punctuation. Then, we spend lots of time editing sentences.
Of course, at the beginning of the year, I don’t expect my students to always have correct sentence structure. But it is still good for them to know and practice. Then, by the end of the year, they have usually mastered these skills.
Final Result
The beginning of the year involves so much modeling and teaching of so many skills. But eventually, it all comes together and students are able to actually write. After going through the first three units of the writing curriculum, their writing should look similar to the picture. They should be able to draw a detailed picture with a setting, characters, and an action. They are able to sound out words to label their picture. They can independently write a sentence that makes sense and matches the picture. And they should at least have a little bit of an idea of correct sentence structure. It is truly amazing to see the progress! And all of this naturally leads us into our next writing unit, which is a kindergarten standard, narrative writing.
