I would like to preface this post by sharing my personal views on writing in kindergarten. They are somewhat harsh...
It is my belief that some writing curriculum used in kindergarten are developmentally inappropriate for 5- and 6-year olds and that students cannot achieve “success” as determined by the curriculum rubrics simply because they are not yet developmentally ready. Fine motor development comes with practice, and many children do not come into kindergarten with extensive experience holding pencils, drawing shapes, and “writing” conventionally or not. Nor do I believe it is reasonable to ask a child to write a story across multiple pages with a clear beginning, middle and end. Tell it verbally, maybe. But written out? The Common Core State Standards say that kindergarten students should “[u]se a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened” (W.K.3), and remember, these are end of the year standards. So, by the end of the year, students should use drawing, dictation AND writing to share their stories. All of those skills are useful, all of those ways of storytelling, not just conventional left-to-right, “first” and “then”, predictable writing. And it is my experience that some (honestly, most) writing curriculum expects kindergarten students to be writing novellas while they are also learning to tie their shoes and share. So, writing is an area of weakness for me because I do not know how to best support a student in doing something that I firmly believe they shouldn’t have to do yet. I have incredible storytellers in my class, and their writing often conveys big ideas. But because it isn’t conventional, it doesn’t often fit the end-of-unit rubrics and thus I’m forced to give lower scores than I otherwise would. But alas, assessments are another topic… today, I want to talk about writing and one way I’ve found that boosts my students writing skills in a developmentally appropriate, engaging, and fun way!
In my classroom, we start the year with story writing. While this helps us tie our storybook reading experiences in with our writing, it often results in my students drawing one picture each day, eventually adding some letters to label people or things in their pictures. We take time to brainstorm types of things they can write about, but it’s always a fine line between supporting their writing and allowing for their creativity. It isn’t story writing, and frankly, I’m not sure how it could be in September of kindergarten. But it’s a fine launching point for the work we are building up to.
But come November, we move into my most favorite unit ever- science writing! In this unit, students become scientists by observing the world around them, documenting their observations in diagrams, learning new content through mentor texts, generating questions about what they notice and hypothesizing about why things are the way they seem. My students are engaged in each step of the investigation process and often blow my mind with their high-level questioning. And their writing is amazing!
First, scientific writing is more structured, more clearly articulated than story writing and thus I can scaffold it with more focus. And for my language learners (which at 5-years-old is pretty much everyone), this specific language support is crucial! We draw diagrams of leaves, pumpkins, and apples, and we label with the real scientific word. This allows students to produce “conventional” work but without sacrificing their understanding or ownership. We conclude each exploration with a class book about the topic, including student drawings with labels, as well as sentence stems. It makes me feel so much better about my ability to support them because I can be more specific in my feedback and my instruction. And their work takes on a more conventional feel because they are working directly off a models (either from me or from mentor text). I love being able to show off their work during November conferences, especially in comparison to their early story writing, to show how they are progressing.
I’ve put my science writing notebook file on my TpT account, which also includes some teacher resources, such as anchor chart models, sentence starters, and vocabulary cards. Check it out and if it appeals to what you do in your room, give it a try! I’m always interested in seeing how other teacher approach writing and scaffold the process for young writers. If you’d like to try elements of the science notebook, shoot me and email and I’d be happy to share the writing paper I use for free!
Teach on!