Not Just Child's Play: Challenging Young Minds: So Proud of My Little Writers!

Writing is a passion of mine! Unlike many Kinder teachers I LOVE teaching writing! I understand the frustration because it is very tedious in the beginning. The students don't know they are writers-they haven't all figured out that they can write, even though they may know their letters and sounds, they don't apply that knowledge to sounding out their words in writing. You have to ask them individually what they have written and write that dictated sentence with them modeling for them how to sound out their words. If you do this regularly (we write every day)-they start to make progress. One of the most rewarding things for me, in teaching this grade is the tremendous growth you see them make as writers.

We have been working on using better adjectives. Not just "good" or "nice". Every week probably about 1/2 of our words of the day are adjectives and we add them to the Word Wall as well so they can take them down and use them in their writing. So I read the story to them called "The Ugly Pumpkin"-a take on the Ugly Duckling-the pumpkin finds out he is really a squash. I asked the students to change one detail-the adjective "ugly" to something else-how would that change the details of the story. I was so impressed with the sheer variety of words they came up with for their stories! I just changed my bulletin board last week, but had to take that down and put these up, my little writers! :)