When I first started teaching Kindergarten I was faced with the overwhelming knowledge that somehow, someway I would need to teach my kiddos how to write beyond the basic letters. How do you even attempt to teach a five year old how to make a sentence? What I learned was that anything is possible if modeled correctly and students are given opportunities to practice, practice and practice. My school chose to teach one letter a week. We would front load all of the letters through our small group and then as whole group go back and dig deeper by teaching a letter of the week. For writing, I chose to front load the writing by spending all of August and most of September teaching basic letter formation. By the time we would finally get to the end of September most of my students could write most of there letters correctly. Now the challenge became how to teach them to write a basic sentence with proper conventions. Enter the Halloween Writing Project. This started as something that I (Sydney) actually did when I was in first grade to reinforce handwriting. When I taught first grade I used this version to not only review basic handwriting and penmanship skills but also to teach about poems and review rhyming words. My first grade students would work on this independently for morning work. When I moved to Kindergarten, I had to reshape this project so that my younger kiddos could also participate
. Instead of it being an independent activity; however, it became a shared writing activity. Each day until Halloween, we would work on one letter. We would read the sentence together and talk about what our picture might look like. I would model how to write the sentence and then we would brainstorm ideas for the illustrations. We would talk about what my expectations were for their writing and pictures (best handwriting, coloring in the lines, appropriate colors). Then I would let the students go back to their seats and get busy while I wandered around and assisted as needed. What I saw from this, was how my sweet little students enjoyed not only becoming writers but also adding their own illustrations. Often students would become upset if we missed a day or ran out of time. I even had days were my students chose to miss recess to write. Seriously, missing recess?! I never imagined that it would be so successful but each year the same thing happened. So if you want to change the way writing is going in your primary classroom then click the link below and grab one of our Halloween Writing Poem Projects. On a side note I always introduced this project my reading my favorite Halloween story:
Room on the Broom Happy Writing!
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Click Here to purchase your copy of this Halloween Writing Project!
Click Here to purchase the first grade version of this Halloween Writing Project!
Here are some student samples:
Here are Samples of the inside pages:
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