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| Kindergarten
Meyer |
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| Week 36 I am SO proud of these writers. They worked super hard to create their reports! Chiefy Neshmia Elite Jose' Madden Randal Charmaine Mario |
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| Week 35 This is the one area that we need to complete. Some of the kids have finished their books and will be presenting them early in the week. Others will be finishing up this week. |
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| Week 34 Here are some pages from our final books! Getting close to the end!   
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| Week 33 For our last unit we will be writing a researched, nonfiction book to go along with the animal unit we are studying in science. The kids have all chosen a habitat to study. We have been looking at a number of nonfiction books and magazines. They have begun writing about what their chosen habitat is like. |
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| Week 32 We did it! We finished our "all about" books. Three students wrote all about skateboards. Others wrote about games we play, families, animals, swimming, aquariums, and even vacuum cleaners. Here they are presenting their works.       
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| Week 31 They're done! We have completed our All About books. Next week, we will make our presentations before we go into our final books! |
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| Week 30 Our first drafts are complete. We will begin a quick revising to add to the pictures and check the spelling of our words. We're so close to done!!! |
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Week 29 Our "All About" books are coming along nicely. Most of the students have completed their front covers and at least one chapter! We are hoping to complete the rest of the books by next weekend. |
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| Week 28 As some of the students finished their "How to" books, others started their "All About" books. An "All About" book takes a very broad subject that we know a lot about, and gives us a chance to write several sections or chapters in our books. Some of the kids chose subjects, then after making an outline, realized that they don't know very much about that subject. Ask your child about the subject he/she chose. If they can't tell you a lot about their subject, please help them think of something that they show a lot of interest in. I tried to convince them to keep their subject very broad. Ex. - animals, games, foods, seasons. But most went with less broad subjects. Some of them are doing ok, but others are getting frustrated, because they don't know what to write about. One student chose "Aquariums". His chapters are going to be 1. animals in aquariums, 2. people who work at aquariums, and 3. food needed for the animals. He was able to tell me about at least 3 ideas in each chapter. Another student chose "Skateboards". I thought that would be a good subject for him, but he is finding the only things he knows about skateboards is that they are cool and he likes to ride them. Help! He needs a different subject. |
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| Week 27 As I said last week, we have begun a unit on nonfiction writing which will happen in the form of a "How to" book. The students have all chosen their topics and written up an outline. However, when we got to the writing part, many of them changed their topics, so we had a slow start for some. On the bright side, others followed through and completed their "How to" books very quickly. We will take that group back to edit and revise, while the others work on their first draft. |
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| Week 26 And our final readers are.....!       We have started our next unit. In this unit, we are going to be working on writing a nonfiction piece. Our first nonfiction book is going to be a How To book. The kids have already started working on ideas of things that they could teach others. Then, they started sequencing the steps to perform whatever task they are going to teach us. Some of them are already wanting to start their writing! |
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| Week 25 This weeks readers....   
 including one that has never gotten up the courage to read to her classmate before! We're so happy to see her courage growing!! |
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| Week 24 We have finished another unit in writing. We had a couple of students excited to read their stories, so we were able to begin on Wednesday! Here they are.....         |
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| Week 23 We are working on our stories
yet. I am seeing some really nice spacing, capitalization,
punctuation, and spelling. It's so impressive! Our biggest
problem is still writing a story rather than a list of things they did
one day. So we'll spend a few more days writing, then we'll go
back to revising to add details and fill in the holes.
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| Week 22 In our writing period we are working on our next story. We have some great stories started, but we are just getting started, so there's not much to tell. |
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| Week 21 We had an easy week in writing this week. We worked on our sight words, started a  new story, then took a break for
our 100th day of school celebration. In doing so, we read I'll
Teach My Dog 100 Words. This is a silly story about a boy who is
bragging about all the great tricks he is planning on teaching his
dog. He starts with simple things like "sit" and "shake hands",
but later is thinking of crazier ideas like "paint the fence" until he
has 100 words for his dog to learn. After reading the story, I
told the class that I think they are way smarter than that boys dog, so
they could learn 100 words, but we would be writing them. We took
a few minutes here and a few minutes there to write 15-20 words at a
time. The kids did all the spelling as a group and we wrote them
together.When you find these pages, you'll probably see a lot of pink corrections. That might mean that the spelling is incorrect, but more often than not, I was correcting letter formation. We have been working very hard on using 1st grade handwriting all year. Lately, we are back sliding, so I corrected letters that are floating in the air, Hhs and Nns that are hard to differentiate, letters that are backwards, letters that are mushed together or written on top of each other and uppercase letters that are in the middle or end of the words. If you can still read the words, this would be a great worksheet to keep for fluency practice. Ask your child to read the words between 2 given numbers as fast as they can. Or give them a number to find and have them read that word. That way they will get practice with their numbers as well. You could also have them read the words across the rows rather than following number order. Or you could ask them to spell the words for you. Some of the bigger color words and number words may cause them problems, but they should be able to do most of the rest. |
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Week 20     
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Week 19   I thought that we would need some time to get back into writing, but the three kids above finished their third stories and wanted to do their presentations, so we jumped right back into it! We have quite a few finishing up details, so we will have another group ready to go early next week! |
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| Week 18 In writing, we worked some more on revising. They are not convinced that there's a reason for my insisting that they add or change things that are already "done", but I'll keep working on them. We are also working on our "college talk" to help make our writing better. "College talk" is using complete sentences and backing up a response with "because..." like a college student has to. It also uses actions to show when we use uppercase letters and punctuation to help us think about how a sentence looks on paper. Finally, we read The  Night Before the Night
Before Christmas - a story about the stress of getting ready for
Christmas. This story opens with Mom getting the flu, but having
to get busy, along with the rest of the family, to help get a tree and
gifts, then bake and decorate. We followed this up with each
child writing about something they do to prepare for Christmas. I
was actually going to just have them draw a picture, then help them
with their writing since it was Friday morning and I expected them to
all be done with learning for the year. Before I got to the
writing part, some of them were already doing it on their own.
And they did a great job! I was so impressed!! |
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| Week 17 In writing, we are working on revising. For a kindergarten, the whole idea of revising is just ridiculous. They give you that look that says, "I already wrote my story. It's done. What's to fix?" So our first revisions involved making our pictures tell the whole story. We added some details to make sure our pictures said what our words might not be saying. Then we asked them to add a few more words to the end of a page to clarify and answer some questions people may have had for us. Here are a couple of our girls working independently!  
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| Week 16 We have started our third writing unit. In doing so, we have been working on a new story that they are writing on their own and a group story that is giving us lots of practice in using the tools we've introduced. We have a group of students that is already using their tools quite well, but we also have a group that still thinks they are too little to work on their own. When we work together, they tell us they can find sight words on our word wall, number words on our number posters and names of days and months on our calendar. Unfortunately, when they work alone, they kind of panic and go back to writing random letters and stress about not knowing how to write words. We'll keep practicing until we convince them that they really are as smart as we think they are! |
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Week 15   
   And these are our readers from this week. They did very well, but after spending weeks working on putting down all the sounds we could hear, we saw a majority of the students tell us what was happening on their page rather than reading what the wrote. For some of the students, they are still not getting enough sounds to make all their words something they could read. But even when they did have enough sounds on the page they are very uncomfortable reading it in front of their peers. We'll be working on that. |
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| Week 14 We started our author's celebration! After many days of working and reworking, we are ready to read our stories for our friends. These were our readers this week. We will have the rest of our authors read their works of art next week!    
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| Week 13 We spent the week working on all the things that we discussed last week such as adding a detail or two, staying focused on one small moment rather than listing many points and going back to see if we are using punctuation, capitalization and spacing, and of course, s-t-r-e-ch-i-ng ou-t w-or-d-s. |
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| Week 12 Week 12 was all about putting everything that we watched and practiced last week into practice. The kids have been working on their stories. We are looking for the stretched words (saying words slowly to listen for all the sounds we can find), space between words, uppercase letters at the beginning of sentences and punctuation at the end. Most of the kids are working on a first draft, but one or two have finished and are now thinking of how to add a detail or two to make their stories more interesting. The area that is causing much difficult is to write a story rather than listing several activities that happened one day. We often get stories that sound like this. "I went to the park. I went home. I went swimming. I ate supper." That's a good beginning because there is a good sequence of events, but we are looking for some detail and emotion. What happened at the park? Did you have fun or did you leave because of boredom? Where did you go swimming? Who was with you? So again, get your children talking to help them get those details flowing! |
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| Week 11 In writing this week, we did a little bit of handwriting practice, some sight word practice and quite a bit of watching Mrs. Meyer demonstrate. The students did choose a new story to start working on. They sketched three or four quick drawings to help them remember what story they wanted to write and to get their ideas sequenced correctly. Then, they helped me write my story. We are finding many more sounds in the words that we are writing, thinking about when to use uppercase and when to use lowercase letters, deciding what type of punctuation is appropriate, and putting space between our words. Finally, we have been talking about using "describing words" (adjectives). They helped me find describing words to make my story more interesting. I was really impressed with some of the great descriptions they are starting to use during our conversations, but when it comes to writing, all those extra words can be quite frightening. And that's ok. We'll keep encouraging them to try to get some of those words in their stories, even if they are only writing color words, number words and "big" or "little". More importantly, right now, is to get them speaking with more descriptions. When they come home and tell you about their daily adventures in school, or what they did with their friends, ask lots of questions. How did it feel, taste, smell, look or sound? How did it make you feel? If they tell you something was big, loud or stinky ask for more detail. As big as a horse, an elephant or a brontosaurus? As loud as a kid on the playground or a bunch of fireworks exploding? As stinky as green beans or a skunk? The more they can describe verbally, the easier it will be to put it on paper. |
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Week
10 We had a number of students who didn't get to read their stories last week so we started our week by inviting them to read their works this week, but only one was ready to do so. I can't say that I blame them. I was never much for public speaking at their age. We will be writing another story soon and those willing will be given another chance to read to their classmates. This week we introduced adjectives in hopes that our future stories will be more descriptive - even if that means just using a color word or number word for now. We will continue to practice using our descriptions verbally until we get brave enough to try to write them. Today, as we discussed a Halloween scene that we made, the students practiced finding some interesting descriptions and came up with "sparkling stars", "happy, orange jack-o-lanterns" and a "glowing moon"! |
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| Week 9 This week, we completed our first "small moments" story. I am very impressed with how hard some of the students worked to get words on their pages. Some are still writing random letters, while others have beginning sounds, and still others have found several sounds in the words they are writing. The stories may be difficult to read, because most of them are not using spaces yet and we are only writing sounds that we know. That means we don't have beginning sounds for words that start with Th, Ch, Sh or the sounds that we've forgotten, so sometimes the writing has sounds that are in the middle or end of the word. That's all OK. Each child needs to start, where they are at and build from there, so that is what we will continue to do. Below are the authors who read their stories to us during our Author Celebration!  
  
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| Week 8 This is a dig deeper kind of week. We haven't started anything new. We are just trying to get the kids to draw the great stories that they are telling us. They have gotten better at giving us the events that happened in their stories, but when we ask them to draw it out, they often want to still try to put everything into one picture. But we dig and dig and dig, until they find another picture to draw that helps tell their stories. We are also working on putting words on the page. They are working on finding as many sounds in the words as they can - not just a beginning sound any more. It's so fun to watch their eyes pop when they realize that they can actually do this! |
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 Week 7This week we talked about writing a story, rather than drawing a picture and telling about it. We started by reading a book called The Paperboy. This is a very simple story about a boy who wakes up when it's still dark and cold out. He gets himself and his papers ready, then delivers them. As he returns home, the rest of the world is beginning to wake up, but he crawls back into his warm bed. After reading this story, we talk about taking a true, but small moment, and making it into a story. It doesn't have to be the most exciting moment that they've lived. We just want them to start stretching their stories over a few pages. So when a child gets excited about getting a new Halloween costume, we ask "Where did you get it from?" "How did you feel as you were driving to the store to pick it out?" "How did you feel when you were in the store looking at all the costumes?" "What did you do after buying the costume?" Then we asked them to put that all in order and tell us their stories. Right now, we are just working on getting their pictures and some labels on their pages. In the next, couple of days we will be sequencing their pages, adding words and a little bit of a description. ex - "I was SO excited." "The store was packed with people." "I can hardly wait for Halloween!" So, of course, I'm going to ask for your help again. When your child comes to tell you about something, start asking questions to make them think about what happened that led up to that point, what happened after it was over, how did it look, feel, sound, smell, or taste, and "How did you feel when this was happening?" |
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| Week 6 We had an easy week in writing. We went back into all the writing that we've started and picked a couple of pieces to fix up. They got to decide if they wanted to add words or details to the pictures or just finish coloring the picture. Then several of the kids presented their work. Here are a few samples.
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| Week 5 Why do we have to do this?  It's a common question in school. So, we are talking about different ways we write and why we write. Number one on our kindergarten list - It might be important to know how to write if you want to get a letter to Santa. We also decided that writing helps us tell a story, leave a message and remember things, like when we write a grocery list. We took a little time out from writing to read a story called Scaredy Squirrel. Scaredy Squirrel writes many lists. He writes his daily schedule, a list of things that he's afraid of, a list of advantages and disadvantages of never leaving his tree, a list of things to keep in an emergency kit and a an exit plan in case he ever needs to leave his tree. After reading all Scaredy Squirrels silly lists we wrote a list of things that show us it is almost fall as we are beginning a lesson about fall in science. Our list was not nearly as silly as Scaredy Squirrel's, but it helped us to think about all the things we've been talking about. |
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| Week 4 This week we talked about adding some details to our pictures and using a letter/sound chart to start writing words. We will be labeling our pictures, if not with a word, at least with a beginning sound. Since we haven't even introduced all the letters yet, this may sound like an extreme task. But we need to get them at least thinking about writing words, even if it's just parts of some words. Eventually, they will add more and have words, then sentences, then whole stories!! I'm telling you, they will AMAZE you by the end of the year. Below are pictures of an author share. After, working really hard on a story, we get to read at least part of it to our friends.    |
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Week 3
If you took a
look at our reading page, you know that we read Here Are My Hands
this week. After talking about that book,
I gave the students 5 pages stapled together. Each page read
"Here are my ___ for ___." following the layout of Here Are My Hands.
We talked about the class books we've written together. Then I
told them that they are now ready to write a book all by
themselves. All they had to do was draw a body part and think of
how we use that part. I would even help them write the words, but
it was their job to draw the pictures and think of the words. My
hope was that they could finish at least 2 pages this week. They
ALL completed all 5 pages! They took me very literally, when I
said "Draw the body part." Some of them have a dot on their page
that represents a nose. We'll go back and add details
later. But now I wish I had given them 10 pages! Even my
very shiest little guy who took awhile getting started, got going and
came up with some great pages like "Here is my smile for making you
happy." and "Here is my hair for sticking up." with a
picture of some very wild hair! I'm loving it! |
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Writing
 As you can probably guess by now, most of my lessons start with a book. So when talking about using details in pictures, I chose Wow! School! The text on each page has only two simple words. "Wow!" and something we find in schools. The illustrations, however, are very detailed.   After taking a close look at how colorful and detailed the pictures are, we started our own Wow School picture book. Look for it to come home in a couple of weeks. |
