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End of Year Writing Activities for Kindergarten and First Grade
As the year comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to review important skills. During the last month of school, I use these end-of-year writing activities to review the writing genres we covered throughout the year. Now, these have to be fun, because kids’ attention spans and effort are often at an all-time low!…
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Discover New Mentor Texts for Your How-to Writing Unit
Procedural writing or “How-to” is one of my favorite units to teach during Writers’ Workshop! There are so many fun ways to introduce the unit that will engage students. One of the best ways to help students during any writing unit, however, is the use of mentor texts. Mentor texts provide concrete examples of great…
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Writing How-to Books in Kindergarten
Kids love to be the expert on things—whether it’s tying their shoes, making a sandwich, or building the perfect block tower. That’s why how-to writing in kindergarten is such a fun and meaningful way to get them excited about writing! In this post, I’ll share simple strategies for teaching how-to books, along with engaging activities…
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How List Writing Builds Confidence in Spelling for Beginning Writers
Writing sentences can be hard for our emergent writers. They have to remember a string of words, have a small bank of sight words to work with, and they need to stretch out words they don’t know how to spell. It’s A LOT. To add to the trouble, many students are hesitant to stretch out…
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Top 8 Picture Books for Teaching Beginning Writers
Every teacher I know loves a good picture book, especially if it helps us to teach an important concept. When it comes to teaching beginning writers, I always use picture books! Picture books are perfect for supporting students in the drawing and storytelling stage. The Drawing Stage Oftentimes in kindergarten, students are rushed to write…
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3 Steps to Incorporate Writing in Reading Lessons with Small Groups
Small group reading is such a HUGE part of literacy instruction. I often hear from teachers who are wondering what’s best to do in these small groups after they’ve read the text. My answer… reinforce phonics skills with writing! Reading and writing go hand in hand. Incorporating writing into your reading lessons reinforces these important skills!…
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5 Tips for Kindergarten Personal Narrative Writing
If you know kids, you also know that kids love to tell stories… like, a lot. If you’ve ever asked a room full of Kindergarteners or 1st graders what they did over the weekend, you know! And, we don’t see all those memes out there about having to sit through your kids’ never-ending stories for…
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Teaching Kindergarten Writing? Look Out for These 6 Mistakes!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… teaching writing is not easy. And, with anything that’s challenging, we’ll undoubtedly make mistakes along the way. We all make mistakes and sometimes we can learn a lot from those mistakes. This is definitely one of the cases! That’s why today, I’m sharing some mistakes I…
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11 Tips for Oral Storytelling Practice in Kindergarten and First Grade
Even if children cannot yet write, they can still learn to tell stories. This is why oral storytelling practice is such a valuable tool for our emergent writers! Learning to tell stories with detail will help your students write with detail later on. Yet, with all the rich benefits, oral storytelling is often a skill…
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5 Tips to Support Emergent Writers in the Drawing Stage
Teaching writing can be hard, especially in Kindergarten! I often see the initial focus of writing workshops placed on text as opposed to spending the necessary time supporting emergent writers in the drawing stage. I think this can be one of the things that makes teaching writing to these littles so hard. If you’re new…
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6 Critical Steps to Launching a Smooth Writing Workshop in Your Classroom
If you’ve been here before, you know I LOVE teaching writing. I think there are so many benefits to incorporating a writing workshop into your kindergarten or first-grade classroom! If you are not familiar with the writing workshop model, it is a method of teaching writing that consists of four main components: The goal of…
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A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Workshop in Kindergarten & First Grade
In terms of both support and resources, writing seems to take a back seat to reading in many districts. Some teachers are given curriculum that’s either overwhelming, not developmentally appropriate or nothing at all. So, today I want to go through each component of the Writing Workshop in detail to help you implement it in…
Category: Writing
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