Palma's Favorite Things: No-More Tears Formula For Writing

Remember The Days...

... when kindergarten students simply dictated what they wanted to write and we wrote it for them?

Sometimes they got to copy it, but we never expected them to write on their own.  Right?

Well, the times have changed and K students are expected to write a compete sentence (or 2 or 3) by the end of K complete with a capital letter, spaces between their words, and a period!  OH, my!

So How Do We Do This?

Leave it to K teachers to come up with a formula that makes kids successful without the anxiety or tears.  The first thing I did was run out to my closest Staples store and buy an EASY BUTTON.  In fact, I bought one in English and one in Spanish!  They get to push the button if it's EASY FOR THEM.

Now, That Was Easy!

The next thing I did was break the sentence down into something they could understand:  pictures!

You don't need to buy a thing, you can just clip pictures from magazines (for the nouns) and take photos of your students doing different things (like singing, jumping, reading) for the verbs.  But, you might like this:

Click the image to go to the download.

I got this idea from the writing mentors in my district and I tweaked it to work for me.  It's super easy and the kids LOVE TO WRITE!

It's called Instant Writing and you just run the pages on different colors of paper:

noun pictures are run on pink paper

verb pictures are run on green paper

nouns to use in the predicate are run on blue paper

The students get a writing template which is run on white paper.

And it's as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1.  They each get one pink, green, blue, and white page.

(They cut apart the pictures on the colored pages and put them in a zip-lock bag.)

2.  They choose 1 pink, one, green, and one blue picture and glue them 

(in that order) onto their white page.

3.  They tell you the sentence they created and write it by copying the words 

from the cards.  (There is also a "helping words page" that I run on yellow and 

laminate.  I keep this on the table so kids can copy words like "under, next to, near, etc.)

This child might write:  A chick wrote on the mailbox."

They LOVE to create SiLly sEnTeNcEs like:  "The bear flew to the beach."

The best part is that there are NO MORE TEARS about writing because it's 

EASY for EVERYONE!

Hope this helps you.

See you all tomorrow for more of Palma's Favorite Things.  

Now, THAT WAS EASY!

Palma :)