Daily writing

I am linking up to the Clutter Free Classroom again.

I decided to share with you how I teach writing in my classroom!

My kids start each morning with writing!  They come in, take care of their lunches and backpacks, answer our question of the day graph, and then find their journals in their book boxes.

The students write the date in numbers on the next blank page. I have read many different methods for helping kids find the next page but my kids seem to be able to find it without any help.  :)  Then they can draw a picture (right now we are having lots of apple trees, pumpkins, and playgrounds).  They can select crayons, colored pictures, thin markers, or thick markers to draw with.  They can draw for about 20 minutes while the rest of the kids arrive.  After the announcements are over, I encourage them to start writing.


I started the year teaching them the three ways to write: scribble writing, writing first letter sounds, and writing words they know or find in the room.  Most of my kids know the letters and sounds.  I have a small group of kids who write random letter strings and three who I write sentences for.

Many of the kids are able to write simple sentences at this point.  A typical sentence would be: I see a tree.
It may look more like this: ICAJe.  (For some reason the tr sounds like a J to them.)  A few of them are trying harder sentences/words.  Many of them are labeling their pictures: sun, bee, apple, bat!


After about 15 minutes, I walk around and give out visors to seven of the kids.  Then I play our morning song.  The kids with a visor will share their writing on the document camera.  The rest of the kids will put their journals away and gather on the carpet.


Then I call one child at a time to share their picture and writing.  I love using their writing as an example to the other kids of great things they can do.  I also use this time to reinforce concepts such as leaving spaces between words, stretching out words, using the word wall, and using punctuation.


My instruction is a blend of reading lots of books on writing with young children.  Here are a few of the books I have read recently.









I will write another post about how we set goals for writing.

How often do you write in your classroom?