Kid Writing

Kindergarten is such an amazing time of growth and learning. Every time K-Girl brings home a paper I'm just blown away by how much better her letters have gotten, how much her drawing has advanced, and all the changes that are happening this year. It's really exciting.

At her school they do this program called "Kid Writing". I took the training for it so I can go in and help the class and it really is an awesome program. It's all about the kids figuring out what comes next. They are taught a little at a time and helped to incorporate those things into their writing (writing left to right top to bottom, spaces between words, periods (etc) at the end, capital letters, etc). They work one on one with an adult to come up with a story that meshes with the picture they have made. You go word by word stretching them out so that the kids can pick out the sounds they hear. They write the sounds they hear and skip what they don't know. They are also encouraged to use their resources such as focus words they may have been studying, age appropriate dictionaries that they now have on each table, or if they know a word is somewhere in the room to go find it and use it.

They work in these books until they are full and then the teacher sends them home. We got her first book back last month and it was so fun looking at the pictures and writing from the beginning to the end. She's having so much improvement. I can't wait to be able to compare the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So I took a few pictures of her book to share. They are in order from earlier work to more recent.

Here's a close up of her writing on this page...

The adults don't fuss with their writing at all. They just help guide as they are working with them, but when they are finished the adult does "Adult Writing" underneath so they see how we would write their "story".

(I am picking apples with my mom.)

(The hippo is saving the bat, the snail, and the bird.)

(The purple apple is trying to make the 'are' disappear.)

(The apple family is coming home from the grocery store.)

I think the thing I love most about these is how random they are. Now and then they are prompted on their subject (they have been nonfiction writers about apples and pumpkins, or asked to write on something else they have been focusing on in class), but typically they are left to create whatever is floating around in their minds. I really love seeing their imaginations coming alive in their writing.

K-Girl just loves school and loves Kid Writing. She wants to play school almost every evening and is constantly writing and asking for help on how to spell this or that. As bittersweet as it can be watching them grow up it is truly amazing to watch the process.

We had her first parent/teacher conference last week. She's doing very well in school which is always a relief to hear. I don't know how much (if any) I have touched on her anxiety with getting lost here on the blog, but her teacher says it has improved greatly. She no longer needs to always hold her hand when she's walking somewhere. She's worked up to being alright going to the bus with her two friends rather than the teacher at the end of the day. It's improved at home as well. She has been generally more pleasant all around and especially at bedtime than when her anxiety had been so overwhelming for her.

Her school pictures also came back last month...

When did I blink and how did she get so big?!