Informational Writing

Kinders have a lot to think about when writing. From letter formation to spelling to sentence structure to providing meaningful content, it can easily overwhelm them. This year while working towards my goal, 4.3 Developing and sequencing long-term and short-term instructional plans to support student learning, I am trying to develop lessons to support student learning of informational writing by breaking up the learning goals into smaller mini lessons. For example, I separated out letter formation and spelling. We play games, add words to our dictionary, and learn spelling patterns during guided reading.

We learned about sentence structure and sentence conventions by acting out, illustrating and writing silly sentences. See image below "A soft snowball runs!" Do you see the shoes and moving marks in the illustration. :)

To help with content for informational writing, I have been reading numerous arctic and antarctica animal books and viewing video segments from Discovery Education. Then, we have been reflecting and doing interactive writing:

Now, I'm taking it a step further. Together, we are making an Animoto movie from the interactive writing. The children decide on two images from Discovery Education and help me type their sentences. I explicitly point out all the different components of writing that we learned as I type. "Do you remember what goes between words?" "What makes the /k/ sound in rock and pack...what's the rule?" "How do you spell 'the'?" By doing this it ties together all the writing learning into this one piece of writing. This reinforces reading, sentence structure, sentence conventions, and informational content of animals.

Wow! The Animoto movie turned out great! The children helped make the final edits before publishing it. We even shared it immediately with our families in that day's tweet which provided a picture of the chart paper interactive writing and the link to the Animoto video!

A few days later, the children did their informational writing prompt and I think they did very well! I noticed everyone was able to think of a topic and had at least a couple of facts. This is an improvement from years past where I would always have a few write narratives or opinions about animals.

During parent conferences, parents were telling me that their child was very interested in animals and making comparisons with new information. Yippee!!