Category Archives: Writing in Kindergarten

Inspiring Young Authors: Big Paper for Big Ideas

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This year, the writing table is one of the most popular centres in our classroom. I often hear from visitors to our class that teachers are having a hard time getting their kids to visit the writing table. My answer? BIG paper! The biggest paper you can find! In my experience, children are inspired by the prospect of a giant canvas. In my class this week, we added large paper (18×24) to the writing table. We are learning about teamwork and working together this month as part of our board’s character education program, so we discussed with the class that having large paper would provide an excellent opportunity for them to work with a partner (or two) to create a drawing or story. I was so pleased to see the children working together to choose a theme/topic and discuss the elements they wanted to include. Children easily shared materials and workspace, and were just as proud of the way they collaborated as they were with their finished products.

If you haven’t given large paper a go, I encourage you to give it a try!

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Writing With Worms

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A few weeks ago I posted about some of our discoveries in the outdoor classroom. One of the things that most captured the children’s attention at that time was a collection of worms. What was interesting was that the worms were wiggling and jiggling all over the place and as they did, the children began to comment on shapes and letters that they noticed:

“That worm looks like an e!” Image

“No, it’s a J!”

“Now it’s making a p!”

“The worms are making letters!”

With my camera handy, I was able to snap a few pictures of the worms in “letter formation” and our worm collecting group shared them with the class during sharing time. We talked about rotating the images to see new shapes and letters. The children wondered if the worms were trying to tell us something. This gave me an idea: writing with worms! I gathered up some pipe cleaners, printed out our worm pictures and created a provocation at the writing table: What letters can you make with worms? I even added some googly eyes to the pipe cleaners for a bit of whimsy (despite the fact that worms don’t actually have eyes…). I also placed some clipboards and writing paper, markers, and an alphabet chart at the table. Soon the centre was busy with children manipulating the “worms” into different letters and writing them down.

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Take a look at some examples of what the students created:

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Can you think of some ways to extend this provocation further? What other opportunities do you see for learning?

Books that Inspire Young Authors

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Every once in a while I come across a book that is so delightfully magical I simply cannot wait to share it with my students. This week I have not one, but TWO such delightful books, based on similar ideas. The first is Press Here by Herve Tullet and the second is Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson. As read-alouds, both books offer opportunities for student participation and are excellent resources for making predictions. In Press Here, the author commands the reader to tap on a single yellow dot in the middle of the page. When the page is turned…voila! A second yellow dot has appeared! The book continues in this vein, asking the reader to clap, blow, tip the book this way and that, until it ends where it started with one yellow dot. The first time I read this book was before lunch, and as the children lined up in the hall I head them exclaiming “You could write clap five times and draw five dots!” and “Yeah! And you can tap all the yellow dots and then make them blue!” They were writing their very own versions of the story! What an inspiring book for my young authors!

Tap the Magic Tree is essentially the same, except with an additional conceptual focus on the changes that occur across the seasons in one apple tree. This story tied in nicely to our Maple Tree Inquiry and discussions that have already been occurring about the fall changes in our community. Since the children were already thinking of ways to create their own versions of this story we set up a provocation at our classroom writing centre this week. What a busy centre this has been! Along with a copy of the book, our provocation included writing materials, newsprint for book pages, construction paper for a book cover, and a stapler. Several versions of Tap the Magic Tree have since appeared in our classroom and the children have been keen to have their classmates’ versions read to them during sharing time. What a wonderful opportunity this has been to create excitement around reading and writing in our classroom!

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Do you have a book to recommend that helped inspire your young authors? I am always looking for the next great read-aloud!