An important goal in Writer's Workshop in Kindergarten is to teach our students to write for a purpose, for a reason which matters. We jump on these opportunities when they are presented. One day this week, we worked together to create the easily-read recipe for our handmade gnocci, to be served up at the Harvest Festival next Wedesday. Wham! There you have it: writing for a purpose. The Black Bats were full of pride as we read it together after completion.

Writer's Workshop continues to be a time of day that students anticipate and enjoy. As we evolve from students who are labeling illustrations into those forming short sentences, a mini-lesson this week focused on, "where is the best place to start writing on my paper?"

"At the top!" - Toggie

Yes, that is correct, even though this is a concept that you and I take for granted, it is these important, fundamental habits that emergent writers must build early, so that they can be successful as they dive into harder writing skills and tasks.  We discussed that we start our sentence, letter, or message at the top, left side of the paper.

In Writer's Workshop we are still plugging away and slowly learning how to correctly write all of our letters using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. After finishing Ll and Kk this week, we are almost half way with learning our capital letters! The students are also expanding their vocabulary by brainstorming words that begin with the letter we are studying. We write the words for them on the white board and they transfer those words into their Alphabooks (i.e. when studying the letter L - lion, ladybug, leaf, etc). We give the students the option to draw the vocabulary, but they must have at least one thing labeled.

This past week we formally launched our Writer's Workshop and sat down to log our first entry. When teaching emergent writer's, you really cannot go too slow, or teach skills too many times. By reading the except from our curriculum below, you will have a broad idea of the scope of our workshop.

" Writing Workshop is an instructional model that supports literacy framework by utilizing modeling, guided practice, and independent practice. Teachers use mini-lessons with whole and small groups to explicitly demonstrate and teach the organization, strategies, skills, and crafts of writing. Teachers provide blocks of time for students to practice the concepts during independent writing. Teachers confer with small groups of students providing differentiated instruction. Students are given the opportunity to share their writing at the close of the Writing Workshop."