Suggestions for doing Writer’s Workshop with Kindergartners



Suggestions for doing Writer’s Workshop with Kindergartners -

The thirty or forty minutes that we call writer’s workshop at the beginning of the school year look very different from a typical writer’s workshop. Mostly, the composing is oral and done with the whole group. We surround children with the language of stories through read-alouds, by inviting them to tell stories and listen to their peers, and by modeling how to tell stories on paper. On a daily basis we continue this language support through more read-alouds, interactive writing lessons and conversations between teacher and student, and by creating opportunities for children to talk with each other.

Eventually (maybe the 2nd or 3rd week of school), children begin telling their stories in their “Drawing and Writing Books”.

Teachers must model stories from their own lives.

▪ What is a recent happening that I’ve told others about?

▪ What’s an ordinary, everyday happening from my childhood?

▪ What personal stories do I tell my own children at home?

▪ What’s a memory or moment that I hold dear?

“It is beginning with ordinary, everyday topics that we make it possible for all of our students to feel they can enter in.” (Horn & Giacobbe, 2007)

Consider your classroom work space when providing areas for students to write. Sometimes children work at small tables with other children, sometimes they are spread all over the room.

Children should be familiar with the location of your writing materials and should be well-informed of the rules for working with these materials. Mini-lessons can be used to teach students about the care and organization of these materials.

“For young children, drawing is writing.” It gives them opportunities to do what writers do: to think, to remember, to get ideas, to observe, and to record. Encourage students to add details to their drawings. These details will later help students to remember to add information to their on-going stories.

Ways of supporting young children as they draw:

▪ Create a drawing center filled with interesting pencils and papers. Ed Emberley’s step-by-step and how-to-draw books are favorites of children.

▪ Ask children to bring in familiar objects from home. These are things they’re probably drawing at home (stuffed animals, animal figurines, etc.). Why not begin with what they already know and love?

▪ Take the same object (pumpkin, car, etc.) and draw it from different perspectives and positions.

▪ Provide time to draw during the writing workshop.

▪ Provide opportunities for making their work better. When it’s expected that children will look at the drawings they were working on the day before, they learn how to think about other possibilities in the drawing.

It’s important to look at students’ writings regularly. Conferencing time is an opportunity to spend those few minutes with students and help them move their writing along. By spending time looking at student work and making notes for yourself, you discover exactly what you can do as a teacher to help each individual become a more proficient writer. There are also things that you notice about groups of children or at times the whole class that you will use as a topic for future mini-lessons.

As students become more accomplished in writing, we invite them to write whole stories with many parts in a booklet. A booklet is pages of copy paper stapled together with a color cover. It’s a format that makes sense to young writers:

▪ It has a cover for the “author” to write the title, his name, and a space to draw the cover picture.

▪ Students naturally want to put pages together to create something. Writer’s workshop is the perfect place to create a “book”.

▪ It has a built-in expectation that you have a lot to say on this topic. (We suggest beginning with 5 pages).

▪ The booklet provides a concrete way to address story structure (beginning, middle, middle, middle, end)

▪ It makes revision easy. Moving parts of the story around is easier when each part is on a separate page.

▪ It lends itself to writing sentences and paragraphs. Most children naturally write one sentence per page.

After children have begun working in booklets, they need information that will push them forward as writers. They need to learn more about the “craft” of writing. These are topics that will be visited over and over again:

▪ Making sure the story makes sense

▪ Writing about what’s important

▪ Time and place

▪ Being specific

▪ Revision

▪ Topics

▪ Proofreading

▪ Conventions

▪ Beginnings, endings and titles

▪ Making the characters come alive

By conventions, we mean going left to right, top to bottom, spacing between words, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

Most of the teaching of conventions takes place during interactive writing sessions where the class, along with the teacher, composes a text together and the teacher helps them write the message conventionally. Sometimes it will be necessary to offer explicit instruction during mini-lessons.

Information taken from: Talking, Drawing, Writing by: Martha Horn & Mary Ellen Giacobbe

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