We've officially launched our winter unit here in kindergarten and we've been so busy learning and exploring about the season, a little dip into learning about penguins, and now we're beginning our mini-unit on The Mitten! It's such a fun time of year and the winter theme is always one of my favorites to teach. Here in southern California we don't have the luxury of a traditional winter like most places do, which can make this so exciting for my kinders. Some haven't even seen or have played in snow before!
I'm excited to share a post on the amazing resources I've found to enhance my lessons this January (and that post to come soon!), but before I do I wanted to get on here and share a writing flip-book my kinders worked on just last week.
How to build a snowman...
We kicked off our winter theme when returning to school after our holiday break and one of the key skills I've been having my class practice is building up their writing confidence with inventive spelling. I've also only just begun this month to introduce them to sequencing story events and what better way to combine both of those skills in one activity?
How-To writing is a great way to get kids excited about writing and writing on a topic that they already know a lot about or have built up a lot of schema in class on the subject. For my kids, a lot of them haven't played in snow or even built a snowman before, so I knew I needed to front-load my lesson with a lot of books and discussions about snow, snowflakes, and what people can do in the snow. By doing this, all of my students can participate and for that reason I decided to have this activity as a shared writing experience.
Since I work at a bilingual school, it's important to get native and non-native English speakers and writers comfortable with writing. One way in which create this stress-free environment is by simply exposing my students to the written word and have them do a lot of shared writing activities as a whole group.
Part 1: Shared Writing
Since I wanted this project to be something that helps my students bridge their understanding of the English alphabet, I decided to have my students complete their flip-books as an extension of our shared writing whole group lesson. I broke this flip-book into multiple days where they worked on just one sentence a day. By reading a variety of books related to
Afterwards I would use my projector to display our sentence up onto the board for them to copy. We've been working hard on letter formation and finger spaces and this is great practice for such skills. Copying sentences are also a great way for my bilingual learners to practice writing and be exposed to written English.
Afterwards I would use my projector to display our sentence up onto the board for them to copy. We've been working hard on letter formation and finger spaces and this is great practice for such skills. Copying sentences are also a great way for my bilingual learners to practice writing and be exposed to written English.
Part 2: Sentence by sentence...
Each day our class worked on the next step of the process of building a snowman. Because of my English language learners, I found it to be beneficial this way - but you can, of course, choose how to work through each page. For older learners a first draft can easily be done in one sitting.
