Kindergarten Workshops, Part 1: Writer's Workshop

Busy little elves. Enthusiastic. Creative. Productive. That's how I pictured Writer's Workshop when I first learned about it ten years ago. That's still how I picture it although it's trickier than I imagined.

Writer's Workshop and Reader's Workshop both follow a good pedagogical model:  the teacher shares a teaching point, models it, and sends the students off to practice it.  As the students practice, the teacher circulates about the room, acknowledging students who are practicing the teaching point.  For example, in a kindergarten Writer's Workshop, one frequent teaching point is "Writers stretch out the sounds to spell words."  When I observe a student attempting to phonetically spell words, I offer some positive feedback like "Maria is using her sounds to spell giraffe!" Other students hear my comment and are encouraged to attempt to stretch out the sounds in a word, as well. At the end of the workshop, I'll ask several students to share their work.  

Here is where it gets tricky:  Not all students attempt the teaching point.  Sometimes this is not a big deal. For example, a student might be working on something else as a writer like writing a sentence using known words or sight words.  I try to comment on this positively but encourage that student to try today's teaching point, as well.  Sometimes, however, few students choose to try out the day's lesson.  They only draw or draw the same thing every day for a month or wait for me to come help them write.  Writer's Workshop takes a lot of patience on my part, especially the first half of the year.  That's when so many kindergarteners can't draw anything representational and/or don't have the fine motor skills or letter/sound knowledge to write.  However, by the spring of each year, I feel rewarded as I see most students are writing simple, legible sentences and some are even writing multi-page stories!

Here is an anchor chart that I created with my students last week:

It has taken us six weeks to get to this point where almost everyone has at least a general idea of these six teaching points. We will use this anchor chart for most of the fall. I'll continually pull my teaching points from it.  For example, I might select "add details" one day and focus on including symbols of the weather in my drawing. Another day I might select "add details" again, and focus on the kind of ground line in my picture (grass, floor, sand.)  When I see that almost all of the students have mastery of these six teaching points, we will move on to other kindergarten Writer's Workshop skills like writing multi-page stories, using transitional words, and including feelings in our writing.

I'll write about Reader's Workshop, Math Workshop, and Crafter's Workshop(!!) in my next several posts.