How To Writing in Kindergarten: Lessons, Mentor Texts, Examples, and MORE!
- Published:
- 12 Comments
How to Writing in Kindergarten Writers Workshop Lessons
How to books is our third in the series of writing units for our kindergarten students. In this blog post we will look at a few mini lessons you could teach, mentor texts you could use, and see what kindergarten students have done with their own writing.
How to Writing Mini Lessons
As I said, this is our third unit of study in our writing program. These young learners have already had writing lessons on narrative writing at the beginning of the year. We have worked on a combination of drawing and writing simple sentences to convey meaning.
Since the whole class has been writing on a daily basis, they already see themselves as writers. So mini lesson plans will be centered around the writing process needed for procedural texts.
How to Writing Anchor Charts
We have some anchor charts that will focus on mechanics such as how to write short sentences. Other anchor charts will be used to remind students of some of the self-help spelling strategies we use all year long. We use these strategies when a student comes to a word they do not know how to spell. For these simple words, they will listen for the letter sounds and put down the sounds they hear. If the kindergarten student needs help with sight words, then we will invite our young children to refer to the word wall or sound wall to help them. We refer to these spelling strategies for the entire year
6 How to Mentor Texts
Like most kindergarten teachers, I am a book collector. There are a few of my favorite picture books I like to use during our writing workshop time.
Books are a great way to hook kindergarten children and help them see how they can walk in the footsteps of some of their favorite authors. Mentor texts also give students the opportunity to hear new words, find sentence starters within each mentor text, and improve their oral language when you include a book discussion. You can also lift a sentence from the text to model what complete sentences look like.
As a side note: When using a mentor text for writing instruction, you will want to be sure you read the book to the whole group prior to your writer’s workshop time.
Perhaps you will want to read and discuss the book during your read aloud time so students have the opportunity to explore the meaning of the story first.
Then, when you are ready to use the book as part of your writing lesson, you will want to flip to the page you want to focus on.
As you know young students can not sit on the carpet for a long time while you read the book from cover to cover AND deliver the writing lesson.
How to Make Slime by Lori Shores
What child does not like slime? This book is a perfect high-interest book that includes using simple materials and easy step-by-step instructions! That clarity of message is really helpful for writing how-to texts.
Caring for Your Lion by Tammi Sauer
This book is hilarious. The illustrations are priceless! Your students will be able to use this book as a mentor text for caring for an animal.
How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth by Michelle Robinson and Kate Hindley
This is another fun book for emergent writers that will model how to care for an animal. Even if it is a woolly mammoth!
How to Babysit a Grandpa by Jean Reagan
There are few of these books in this series. I love how the author included “tips” for the reader to follow. That is something we want to ensure to include in our writing mini-lessons.
Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
We included this book in the kindergarten writers workshop units that we published in 2011. It is a classic and a wonderful mentor text for how to writing.
In Your Monster Won’t Go To Bed by Denise Vega
In addition to being a great mentor text for how to writing, this books is also great for discussing the author’s voice or tone. The word choice is pretty spectaculary too!
How to Student Samples
Without further ado, here are a few how-to student writing samples from my kindergarten classroom. These are samples from early November.
This student example is from a little later in November. She was really focusing on “telling more.” I am proud of what she came up with.
I don’t concern myself too much with handwriting. We can focus on that during other parts of our instructional day. However, we do talk about making it neat so the reader can understand your message. I think she did a great job. We will get those capital letters out of the middle of her sentences with time. Right now, I just want to say, “Well! Done!”
WANTING MORE ON WRITING?
Since I LOVE talking about writing, I have a few (dozen) blog posts about writing.
- Writing Folder Organization FREE file!
- 5 Things You Need to Know About Writing
- Or HERE to read them all
Writing Through the Years – Writers Workshop Print and Teach Writing Curriculum
If you are looking for help with your writing instruction, Deanna Jump and I have created detailed writer’s workshop lessons. They will help you with day-to-day instruction for those just starting out or you can use them to supplement your own writing curriculum.flowdesk
We know you are busy and having one more thing to plan may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry… we’ve got you covered.
Our writing units are so easy to follow and will save you so much time. We have taken the guesswork out of planning with a lesson sequence that will take you from the first unit to the last.
These are written for primary grades by teachers with detailed, scripted grade level appropriate lesson plans at are quick and effective. We have multiple grade levels to meet your needs.
- Writing Writers Workshop: Writing Through the Year for Kindergarten and First Grade
- Writing Writers Workshop: Writing Through the Year for Second Grade
Pin for Later
Recommended Posts
Deedee Wills
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
Hi, I'm DeedeE.
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
Free curriculum planning Map
Use Promo Code: WILLS
SHOP
Latest Posts
You Might Also Enjoy...
12 Responses
Love this post. Their writing was AWESOME!!
Thanks for sharing, Deedee.
My autumn tells me all the time "how-to" do things… I can't wait to get her to start writing them down! I seriously think I could homeschool my girls with all the wonderful resources from all of you out there in blogland! but then I think… do I really have the patience to have them at home ALL. THE. TIME. haha!
I love your writing and math units. They are very effective and certainly some of the best TPT purchases I have ever made. Tried and true! These writing samples show so much growth! I need to remember to concentrate on the objective and let things like capitals in the middle of words go. Thank you so much for the reminder! 🙂
Kid writing is the best! And, clearly, you are nailing it as a teacher!!!!
I know this is unrelated but I wanted to know if you continued with the whole brain teaching techniques.
Hi Dee Dee! I love your students' writing! I show my students them everytime you create a post as teachable tools. I have a question about your bundle. When or what unit would you specify discusses handwriting per say? I want some lessons where I can take out those capital letters in the middle of our sentences! Any recommendations. I would love to use this to supplement because we already use the Lucy Caulkins Series.
Thank you! We actually address it continuously in all parts of our day. It is a tough nut to crack for SURE!
Thank you so much for sharing, Deedee! I am from Australia and teach the same age group. It is always wonderful to see how everyone around the world teach and learn.
I totally agree! I love peeking into other classrooms!
I’m curious how your students are already able to write using spacing, punctuation, phonetic and real word spelling in November??!! Especially when kids come to you/us not knowing what a letter yet a word is. It’s the end of the 2nd qtr for us this week and my students are just beginning to write like your November students. What am I not doing? I feel like I model constantly, give them writing experiences daily, but every year it takes until at least the end of 2nd qtr before they look anything remotely like your November writings
Hi Toni! Certainly, not all of my students are writing flawlessly, but the majority are. I am doing guided reading (with guided writing), interactive writing with our Guiding Readers close reading units, and writers workshop. I also used our Read, Trace, Glue, Draw pages which offers daily opportunities to reinforce these skills as part of our morning work. I think the daily and consistent activities help.
I taught at a title school with ESL students, so I don’t think my students can in with above average skills. In fact, I had about 40% with little letter identification skills (under 15 letters) and about 60% with little sound ID (like under 5 sounds). It is a hard push all year for sure! But I love to see their progress and I celebrate every victory along the way.