What kindergarten writing looks like - a year of student samples

My daughter is 5 years old.  As a former kindergarten teacher, the writing at this stage is my absolute favorite.  I find great joy in "seeing" progress through writing and I have tried to take pictures of her writing samples to create an online portfolio of her work, meaning, a post here on the blog that I can look back at and see how far her writing has come.  Although my daughter struggles with some vision and fine motor issues, her desire to write and creative imagination help her to be a successful writer.  She is just an average kindergartner with an amazing passion and zest for life.  Since she was 3, she has spent almost every day of her life writing something; a letter to Grandma, a grocery list, recipes for food and more recently, stories.

I am Snow White.  I am raccoon.  I am deer.

Here is a sampling of her writing for parents who may be interested in knowing what a kindergartner can and should write like.  Our current standards require kindergartners to

• Draft writing by drawing, telling, or writing about a familiar experience, topic or text; that is appropriate to the topic, audience, and purpose.
• Edit for correct use of end punctuation, including periods, question marks, and exclamation points.
• Edit for correct use of knowledge of letter/sound relationships to spell simple words.
• Produce, illustrate and share a finished piece of writing.

Their end of the year portfolio states that they must write a paragraph about a given subject with a topic sentence and three supporting sentences.  Gone are the early stages of writing continuum's that I was taught to use with early writers.  Kindergartners now have higher expectations in writing.  Although I feel that not all children may be developmentally ready for these tasks, I would like to believe that with strong parent support, our children can meet (or come close to meeting) these expectations.  Can my daughter meet and exceed all these new standards and assessments - I hope so, but realistically, I know that she is not currently quite at the stage of writing that these standards require.  Although her thoughts and ideas are expressed with creativity, she writes with energy and uniqueness, and she uses "lively" word choices, her conventions and spelling need some more attention!

 Hot chocolate is hot.  Salad is green.  But my favorite thing is ...

Order

Ravioli, ravioli and soup, soup, vanilla, water, milk, juice

Christmas was great.  I liked what Nicholas gave me.  It was a dog.

The book is Hannah and the Seven Dresses.  She does not know what dress to wear.  The fourth dress has ruffles.  She put black pants on her birthday.

I do not like to get a shot. It hurts a lot. Oweee.

This is the first time that we start to see speech bubbles.  In my kindergarten classroom, I would encourage reluctant readers to use speach bubbles.  Many kids find them interesting and motivation to write in.  She is using longer sentences in her writing now - 8 words in this one - with no adult promting.  She is capitalizing and spacing on her own!  You can't see it, but after the Owee is an exclamation point!

This bee is a special bee.  It pollinates roses.  It has wings like a butterfly.

We try to change up our writing so it does not get boring.  Writing can and should be fun and interesting.  After a visit to an art festival where we talked with a local artist, I did a directed draw activity with her to make the bee and she wrote her sentences afterwards.  I really need to explore mediums other than markers, crayons, and colored pencils when creating a picture or illustration for our writing.  Research has shown using art before writing, exspecially with water colors help improve creative writing, as the colors flow and change, creating new thoughts and writing directions.  It is something for me to work on doing more!

Once upon a time, there was an old woman.  Her name was Emilesa.  She was poor.  (My Thing)

We have found that as the year of kindergarten progresses, the teacher asked for more specific writing tasks such as book summaries or using 3 specific words of the week.  The more specifications included, the less my little one wants to write and the more she craves creative writing.  This was a little story that she wrote a few days ago after writing a book summary for her school homework, a letter to her Grandma, and 2 other stories.  She sat for hours (her choice) just writing.  Those are the days when I am so very thankful that we do not have a television!

We have blogged about writing many times before.  If you would like to get more ideas on how to encourage writing here is a post about story writing with stickers and another about finding ways to keep writing fun,

Would you like to learn more about writing?  Here is a post about the reading and writing connection with ways to support your childs' writing and another one about writing and the 6+1 traits of writing with links to printable rubrics.

Last week, we had several writing related link-ups that I wanted to highlight!

The first is an awesome activity for children learning to write from the blog Happy Being Trevey.  It is also great for strengthening their hand muscles which are needed for writing.  If you haven't done this with your kids - I strongly recommend it!  This is a fun way to practice spelling words too!

The second is an out of this world pronoun practice activity for more advanced readers from the blog Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational.  Although she doesn't mention writing, one could easily include a follow up activity to allow for writing sentences using the correct pronouns =)

So what are your thoughts on Kindergarten writing?

Are you a teacher?  Are the expectations in your school and ours just about right? Do you think we are on the right track? How can parents better support their children's writing development?

Are you a parent?  Are you kids enjoying writing?  Do you think they are getting enough "time" writing? How can you help to facilitate an improvement the quality and quantity in their writing?

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