I Love to Write Day!

A few weeks ago, the students of Harlan celebrated I Love to Write Day!  On this day, each class rotated through 3 different classrooms to enjoy a variety of writing activities!  All of the children at Harlan were working in 3 areas of writing - adding details, writing directions, and describing in words.  To accomplish this, each of the kindergarten teachers taught one of these lessons.

Mrs. Singer's lesson was about adding details.  The kindergarteners were given a boring sentence about a dog.  They were then taught to add describing words to make the story more interesting.  This included saying that the dog was "big" or "little," and their tail was either "long" or "short" and even "fluffy!"

Mrs. Mills taught the children about describing things using our words.  Each kindergartener was given an animal to draw.  Then , working with a partner, they had to describe what their animal looked like without saying its name!  Their partners had to guess what was being described.  This included, size, shape, color, where they might live, and what they like to eat!

In our classroom, I taught a lesson on everyday writing.  The kindergarteners were reminded that while we have become authors, writers write more than stories and books.  We discussed other types of writing like songs, notes, recipes and instructions.  They were then given a picture to complete using a selection of -at and -ap words.  After putting "the bat on the rug,"  or "the cap on the lap," they then wrote 3 step directions so that someone else could create the same picture.  We used words we have learned like "is" and "cat," and stretched out new words like "rug" and "on."

I was not able to get pictures during the workshops, but I did get one at our assembly.  Here is Penny the Pencil teaching us to "show, not tell" in our writing.  Penny was on the news each day that week giving us ideas on making our writing more interesting.  She even stopped by our room to visit and check out our writing!  In Room 100, Penny is a rock star!