Spending the last few weeks in Kindergarten has been, well, enlightening. After
recovering from the shock of the honesty of 5 year olds ("Are you having a baby? Well, no! I think I will be
living on the treadmill, though!) and their interesting eating habits (Why DO they put IN their mouth what they spent so much time getting OUT of their nose?), I really, really enjoyed my time doing interactive writing with these little
toots angels. Really.
I started my time in Kindergarten by observing the teachers and conferencing with the kiddos during Writer's Workshop. We noticed that spacing, capital/lower case confusions, and use of the word wall were skills that needed some teaching and practice. Interactive writing is one of the BEST ways to accomplish this, giving the boys and girls practice with just the right amount of support.
So...the journey began.
The Book Fair was occurring my first week of modeling Interactive Writing. So, we began with a pattern story, based on the "If You Give A...." books by Laura Numeroff.
The next week, the Kindergarten students were learning about procedural texts. That just happened to be the week of Valentine's Day/parties/love. Making hearts seemed an easy enough task. You know, cut out simple heart shapes, then write about how to make hearts! Luckily enough, it also became a problem solving activity. Just go with it....
The next skill to be taught, based on the Kindergarten TEKS, was captioning. I began by reading aloud The Umbrella, by Jan Brett. We then sequenced and labeled the animals who were in the umbrella. A caption about our "illustration" was then written.
And, we finished off by adding a page to Jan Brett's book, The Umbrella. She is an awesome author, but Kindergarten authors made that great book a little bit better. At just the point in the book where the animals "kersplash" into the water from the umbrella, 5 year olds "kersplashed" onto the carpet, froze, and thought about what they might say if they were the animals. We wrote a few of the "quotes" together, and then the students were split into small groups, where they made animals. The classroom teacher and I went to the small groups, and the children wrote what their animal might have said. This is a version of Interactive Writing, done in a small group. These are just super cute!!
The process for these interactive writing sessions is basically the same. To encourage spacing and one to one correspondence, a child is chosen as Space Girl/Boy. This is generally a child who is having a hard time with these concepts in reading and writing. To encourage the process of linking and analogy, children with same beginning sounds in their names were asked to write, other children were asked to write word wall words, point at the word wall words, or write parts they knew and heard. Conventions were taught and expected during this time. I also introduced Elkonin boxes as a means of hearing and recording sounds in words. The kiddos had their own laminated copies of boxes, which they all filled in with a dry erase marker. At times, the students also had white boards, which enabled them to write as the child at the easel was writing. Children are now excited to link, find words they know on the word wall, and space between words. This is done independently and confidently. The difference in these four weeks is astounding and exciting!!
Whose Egg? was especially fun...filled with chances for inferring. Then students wrote their own "flap" about something they read in a non-fiction book during independent reading. On the outside flaps, they gave clues about their subject, on the inside, they wrote and illustrated the "answer". 
