Late Winter- Writing Independently

By the end of January and beginning of February, the students are now writing on their own.  They may still use inventive spelling which is still acceptable at this age.  The sentence above was written with the aid of a prompt, but the end of the sentence was written by the student on their own.

Early Winter- Wrting a Sentence with Some Assisstance

By early winter the students are able to independently copy a sentence off the board.  Even though they have copied the sentence there are many times that I still have to have the students go back and look at their work to make sure they have included punctuation or have capitals and lower case letters in the correct spot.  Notice in the picture below where the student has gone back and made such corrections.

The details in the picture have improved drastically since the beginning of the year.  There are wrinkles on the face of the older person.  The groundhog's shadow matches what the groundhog looks like and there is a tree, sun, and sky in the picture of the groundhog.

Fall- Sentences Start to Emerge.

By the time October and November roll around the students are writing a little more on their own and you can start to see the beginning stages of sentence writing.  In the picture above the student has used invventive spelling to write a few words and it also still has a few random letters to represent the other words. The words in the sentence are strung together and the sentence lacks punctuation.  The sentence says I saw a pumpkin on the vine.  The details in the picture have also improved.  You can see the pumpkin's indentations represented by the lines and the vine has leaves on it as well.

The First Weeks of School

During the first few weeks of school I begin to assess where my kindergartners are in the process.  Many times the pictures are very basic and consist of just a few stick figures.  The writing is usually just a few letters or scribbles to represent the words.  Because the letters are very basic I will ask the students what their picture is about and then write a sentence for them to show them what a sentence looks like.

Questions to Ponder

My kindergarteners are just beginning to learn how to write and because of that I also have them draw pictures with their writing to show that pictures and writing go hand and hand to convey meaning.  Each time they do a piece of writing I ask them certain questions to help them improve their writing. A few of these questions are to improve their writing in the short term, but a few of the questions help them to see the growth that they have made over the course of  the year.


Am I remembering to use punctuation?
Am I using capital and lowercase letters in the correct way?
Have I included details in my picture and writing?
How has my writing changed during the year?
Has my writing gotten better?
How can I improve my writing next time?