We do much writing in Kindergarten, and the concepts and skill sets are broken into bits that can be stretched over a school year. Writing can be powerful, exciting and liberating to children once they get a taste of how it is done. It can also be daunting, overwhelming, confusing and bittersweet. As teachers, it is a delivate process that you want to treat carefully as you let kids get the taste throughout their early schooling years. We work with writing on several fronts in our particular classroom formally: We have a writer's workshop which weaves all these concepts together, marrying the artistic side of writing, with the logical printing (execution) side. We also have a handwriting book, where we focus soley on copying print, our pencil grip, and how our print looks. These are TWO very different skills, and when we teach these skills we are only concered with the student understanding and working on that particular objective. To be more clear, I will give an example.

When we are journaling and have just disbanded from the mini-lesson about the kids writing an exciting non-fiction story, I am going to let these students sound out words that are not spelled correctly, they may not be using the best print, but their brain is excited to get a story on paper that and the ideas are flying around much more quickly than their little hand can keep up. Get it? Please don't worry about a reversed letter when your excited emergent writer is trying to tell you about the alien on the pirate ship!

This week we continued in our learning of writing in different genres, or in basic terms, just writing for different reasons! The idea this week: recipes!  We talked about what a recipe is, and how we used it as a class just last Wednesday when we baked bread with Emily in Farm and Garden. A recipe is important. I showed the class two different versions of a recipe for the same thing. How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We concluded that they both gave the same information, one just used more detail, and thus more writing. Then we came up with something crazy: we wrote a recipe for a body! We were very organized and worked together to make sure we did not exclude any important parts. Afterwards, we each sat down and wrote our own more conventional recipes (far more tasty that a body!)

We do a lot of writing in Kindergarten. Let me rephrase that...we do a lot of writing at different times of the day in kindergarten. Let me try it one last time: We write many times each day in Kindergarten for different and real purposes! Possibly the coolest thing about teaching kindergarteners to write, is to instill the passion, motivations and passing along all the different purposes to write! Some kids don't want to write a story, that's cool...lets figure out something to write! Do you want to write a:

letter to someone?

Make a poster?

Create a recipe?

Illustrate and send a postcard?

A story problem to solve?

a list?

a play?

You get the idea. These kids see writing as a necessity and their passport to more independence and knowledge.  This week, we had a group of kids outside at recess who begged to go inside and get clipboards and pencils to write clues about how to help others spy on leprechauns. Hey - I'm not here to judge, whatever rocks your boat, right? Yes! And  writing leprechaun clues was apparently rocking their boat. We write in here at morning meeting, record facts in our trout journal, we write in our math journals, green journals, orange journals, we write on whiteboards, in alphabooks, we make signs on cardboard, we write in our sign-in book... the options are endless and we are ecstatic about it!