Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007

Overview In the teaching of writing, curriculum comes from both the ongoing structures that last across the year and from the changing units of study that provide learners with their course-of-travel. The ongoing structures provide a continuity of daily practice and of coaching which allows learners to practice and improve skills (this is necessary whether the learner is a gymnast, a programmer, a mathematician or a writer). These structures include mini-lessons, conferences, partnerships, writing folders, work time and the like. The units of study, on the other hand, allow students to tackle new and often increasingly difficult challenges. What’s necessary is education that involves both ongoing structures and changing units of study. The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project’s recommended calendar for kindergarten writing is designed with New York State’s rigorous assessments and the National Center for Education and Economy standards in mind. Teachers from other states sometimes need to alter the curriculum to take into account their state’s standards and assessments. This calendar may not exactly match what any one of you might decide to teach across your year, but we are all excited about this as one highly recommended template. We are aware, however, that the best curricular calendar is one which a group of teachers (preferably those across a grade level) co-author together, taking into account their own areas of expertise and curiosity, their students’ abilities, prior experiences, and interests, their state and local assessments, and their school’s curricular plans. We therefore encourage you to adapt this to suit you and yours. To support teachers in writing their own curriculum, this calendar includes opportunities to author units of study by making personal curricular choices and building on supports offered here. We do not believe there is anything inevitable about this particular curriculum. We know there are lots of other ways in which teachers-of-writing could imagine a year-long writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study because this is the line of work that the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project will support across the upcoming year with conference days. If you and your colleagues find the conference days help your teaching, you will probably adopt large portions of this as your plan for the year.

1 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Like all our curricular calendars, this one stands on the shoulders of many years of work in hundreds of classrooms. Unlike the others, a version of this curriculum has been written in great detail in a series of books, Units of Study in Primary Writing (Heinemann, 2003, http://www.unitsofstudy.com). There is also a DVD containing 22 videos which illustrates this curriculum.

Kindergarten Writing Calendar September October November December January February

March April May June

Launching Writing Workshop Personal Narrative Small Moments Writing for Readers Writing for Many Purposes How to Texts or Author Your Own Unit of Study: Literary NonFiction; Rewriting Our Versions of Fairy Tales; Letters; Songs; and Scripts All About Texts Poetry Revision /Authors as Mentors Independent Projects

2 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 September Unit 1 – Launching Kindergarteners as Writers The most important thing we can say about September in the kindergarten writing workshop is this: don’t wait! It is tempting to think that you first need to teach your children some letters and sounds or that you first need to socialize your youngsters into the routines of school. But, we promise you, the writing workshop is an absolutely perfect structure for kindergarten children at the very start of the year. So gather your little ones around you and lean in close. Point out all the books that surround your meeting area. Tell the children that every one of those books has been written by an author—and that your children, too, will be authors this year. Then tell them, “I’ll show you how to be an author and this very day, every one of you can be an author.” Demonstrate by telling children that authors usually think of something that we’ve done, and we remember that event. Then, we take a piece of paper and put what we remember onto the page! So for example, you might tell children that you bought a new shirt to get ready for school. Then draw yourself, standing at the store counter. Draw the shirt too, of course, and maybe your purse. Add the shop-keeper, too. Then shift effortlessly into writing some words. Label the main items that together comprise your story. So in this instance, you’d label yourself (me) and the shirt (shirt) and so forth. For now, slowly say the word you want to write but not in a staccato voice, and just write the letters. This is not the time for pointers on the ‘sh’ blend and so forth! Tell your children that they can think of something they did the day before, or over the weekend. Ask them to give you a thumb’s up if they’ve thought of something that they did. Invite them to turn and tell a friend the story they remember. Then tell them they’ll need to get paper from the bin at the center of their table, and put their memories onto the paper. During the early days of a writing workshop, a child will think of a story, draw it, and then either label it or not. We know most children won’t know sound-letter correspondences, but some will make little letter-like squiggles or copy letters from around the room. Whatever they do will be interesting—and completed quickly! Therefore, you will not be able to tarry before teaching children that when writers finish one story, we start the next. Many teachers use this as a time to give folders to children with one pocket for finished stories and one for work-in-progress. Chances are good that your little ones won’t sustain work on a story for more than a day (to say the least) but one of your goals will be to teach them that a single piece of writing merits more time than they ever dreamt possible. To teach this, you will want to spotlight the fact that writers revise. We look back at our stories and remember the event, and realize we left stuff out. For kindergarteners, revision usually involves adding details into drawings.

3 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 In order for any of this to work well, you will want to help children draw representationally. “Does your dog have a head?” you’ll ask, and show the child how he or she can draw a circular head. “Is that all that your dog has or does he have a body, too?” you’ll ask. This is important work because you are teaching children that their marks on the page carry their mental pictures. Within a day or two, you’ll want to teach children how to reread their stories. This might sound funny, given that most won’t have any letters on the page, but you can teach them that a writer can take his or her pencil, touch the different things on the page, and say the story that accompanies that representation. For example, you might touch the picture of yourself and say, “I bought a shirt (touch the shirt). I went to the counter (touch it) to pay for it (touch the money) and the lady (touch her) said, ‘It’s beautiful!’” Notice in this instance that you will not have read your story like this: “me,” “shirt,” “counter.” As children are drawing and perhaps writing their labels, don’t waste any time before you teach them phonics. If a child has drawn himself on a bike, listen to his story (I rode my bike) and then say, “Let’s write bike.” If the child protests that he doesn’t know how to write bike, then tell him, “I’ll show you how. First, you say ‘bike’ slowly. Do that.” Let him do it, and join him, speaking in a quieter voice. Then say, “Let’s think about what sounds we hear in b-i-k-e,” and say it again, this time more slowly. “Say it with me,” you’ll say, so the child joins you in stretching it out. Listen with the child to the sounds. “What do you hear?” The child might say “b…” but that is unlikely. If he says, “I hear /b/” then tell him, “Write that down” and look intently at the paper, as if you have not a single doubt but that he can supply the letter. It is interesting to see what the child produces. If the child records anything, then read it back, saying, “Bike.” You’ll probably then want to move on to labeling the next item. Chances are good that the child will not have heard a /b/ sound, and you may want to demonstrate how you say the word slowly and listen to a sound, producing your own /b/. You can also tell the child that the letter b makes a /b/. However, if you have taught the letter b, don’t progress to teaching the long /I/ sound. This child will need your help in saying words slowly, isolating the first consonant sound, and sometimes matching that sound to a letter. Don’t even dream of moving on to help the child spell the word in full. Instead, move to asking the child to help you label his bike basket and his boots (or any other b item you can find in the picture). In such a way, you invite your kindergarteners to recall episodes from their lives, to record these on a single page, to revise their pictures by adding detail and to label their pictures as best they can. After about a week in which children write single-page pieces, you can rev up the entire enterprise by inviting them to write a second page, stapling it behind the first. The room will be on fire with energy. At the end of the month, ask children to choose their best piece and to revise it (doing more of the same and making a cover, of course, so it looks like a real book).

4 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 October

Unit 2 – Writing Personal Narratives and Telling Stories You will notice that we’ve taken the sequence of story-work described in Units of Study Across the Year in Primary Writing (Heinemann) and tailored it to support kindergarten children who come to school without a strong knowledge of letter-sound correspondence and of story language. If your kindergarteners have been in pre-school and have grown up surrounded by rich literacy, you may decide to instead follow the units from those books and from the first grade curricular calendar. Your goal in this unit is to be sure that all your youngsters can generate true stories from their lives, record these across the pages of little booklets using vaguely representational drawings, tell a cohesive, sequenced narrative, and label lots and lots of items from each page. You will not worry just yet about teaching these youngsters to focus their stories so as to produce small-moment accounts. You will, however, care very much that your children are telling stories that sound like stories, and this means that you will be modeling stories in which characters talk and the details create story drama. At the very start of this unit, you will want to tell your children that they will all be writing books. The choices of paper, then, will change so that every child is writing in little 3-4 page booklets. Because this curriculum is tailored to classes in which most of the kindergarteners don’t enter the year with letter-sound correspondence, for most of your children, the paper will contain a large space for drawing, and a single line for the author’s name. As soon as some children are labeling with initial and final letters, move them towards writing their stories in sentences and add a line or two at the bottom of the page. (Some teachers want to have a line at the bottom of the page from the beginning of the year on as an invitation for children to approximate writing, recording strings of letters. This is your decision.) Your children will already know how to think of things they’ve done and record these in drawings. Now you will show them that they need to think of what happened first, then afterwards, and then at the end. Teach your children that before they write, they can hold their booklets in their hands and touch each page, saying aloud the words that accompany that page. Help them do this same work when “reading” published storybooks you’ve read often to them so they grasp that ideally the stories they “write” will sound like those they read. Once a child has told a story, he will need to draw the story adding in details. Once the story has been recorded pictorially, the child will want to reread it again and again, and then of course you’ll need to teach him that he can label almost everything that is on his page. You may start by pointing to the picture that you believe represents the child and asking, “Who is this?” When the child tells you, you can register surprise and say, “I had no idea! Why don’t we write ‘me’ so people will know.” Then teach the child to say “mmmmeeee” (stretching it out but not making the word staccato) and to listen for the first sound. It is not always easy for a child to isolate the initial sound in a word but this is 5 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 phonemic awareness so don’t do the work for the child. Demonstrate, and then scaffold the child to try this too. Once it is established that the sound the child wants to record is /m/ ask the child, “What letter makes that sound?” The child will very likely not know so you can either tell her, or you can refer to the names of children in the class and reference the name chart. This helps the child use that chart (and charts in general) as a reference. Ideally, you’ll have copies of the name chart (with photos) at each child’s writing area. Once children are progressing along with independence, writing and labeling their hearts out, then you can, if you wish, help children revise their stories. For example, you can point out that in the books they are reading, the characters actually talk. The wolf calls out, “Little pig, little pig, let me in!” Maybe there are people in their stories who could talk and the children could include their characters’ actual words in the story. Similarly, you can encourage children to make some parts of their stories really exciting by telling more stuff. Later, you will describe this as stretching out the heart of the story. Don’t bring all the jargon into your kindergarten classroom, but do invite children to approximate the work that authors do. Remember that most of what your children do for now will be oral, not written…but meanwhile, they’ll be labeling and therefore using everything they know about sounds and letters. If you have ELL children in the first two stages of language acquisition, encourage them to make drawings and think of letters and sounds. Some will not be ready to make letters and sounds because they are just beginning to acquire English. In this case, before students produce English, the teacher will want to tell the student what she sees on her page. She may say, “Look at your writing! Is this you?” The student can respond with a “yes” or a “no.” “Are you in the park?” The student may nod his or her head. “I see a tree. I see the sun. Look at all the flowers!” This way, students can have some meaningful language experience between the teacher and their own drawings. Writing Partnerships Over the next few months, you will want to make as many links to early reading behaviors that you can across the curriculum. Writing partnerships in writing workshop can begin to share their booklets just as they share their books in reading workshop. They can work on holding the booklet between themselves. They can work on turning pages and telling the story through their pictures and labels. They can work on one to one match as they point to pictures and name the things that they see. Partners can rehearse their stories out loud. You will want to take this opportunity to have children talk about their writing, much like they are learning how to do with their books. Partners can name for each other favorite pages or parts of their stories. They can find pages and parts of their stories that they think are important. They can find places where their stories remind them of themselves. As students begin to expand their labels to sentences, teachers can have kids reread their writing with their partners. You will want to work on partnerships using one to one 6 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 match, creating spaces in their writing, stretching out sounds and adding in more letters, and asking each other if that makes sense.

7 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Unit 3 – Small Moments with a Focus on Writing Labels to Sentences November In this unit, we help children value tiny moments from their lives. We teach them that writers hold these moments in our minds and hearts, then make a story out of them, one that stretches across a sequence of several pages. Instead of writing about the whole move from the old house to the new one, a writer writes about saying good-bye to Annie. The story begins with knocking on her door, then the goodbye, then the writer’s feelings as she walks away. Then writers reread what we’ve said, and see details we may have overlooked, confusions we may have created, or feelings we want to bring out. Writers revise as part of writing, easily and in an effort to tell the truth and to put life onto the page in ways that match reality and make sense. It is essential that your children are writing in prefabricated 2-4 page booklets, with paper that matches each child’s level as a writer. Most of your children should be labeling using beginning and ending letters. You will want them to write in sentences below their pictures. They will need booklets that contain a large space for drawing and a line or two for writing. Be sure to continue to spotlight the importance of drawings so that your students don’t lose ideas they cannot yet express in words. Be aware that as students begin to work in booklets some children may write the entire story on the first page, while others turn each page into a different story. These problems can be addressed in small group work. It is equally important that you immerse your children in good literature. Use stories that are small moments. The Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee and Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems are good exemplars. In addition to reading picture books, you will want to create a small moment story together during interactive or shared writing, one which can serve as a model. Be sure this story is focused. For example, instead of writing all-about reading workshop time you could write the story of when Peter was reading a funny book and couldn’t stop giggling so he had to find a special place to sit. The children will begin to see the difference between “all about” structure versus “a time when” story structure. Storytelling will be an important, contributing part of the workshop. Give children time each day to tell stories to a long-term partner focusing on sequence. They can think about how they want to start their stories and end them. They can then sketch these stories across their pages in the prepared booklets. This unit of study emphasizes certain qualities of good writing including focus, detail, sequence, leads, writing with a sense of story, and answering the reader’s questions. Some teachers find it helpful to have writers close their eyes and remember themselves doing an activity, recording what they did first and then next. Encourage children who are writing sentences to write high frequency words in a snap or by checking the word wall. Some of your students will still be working on labeling their pictures. Some children only hear initial sounds in a word, and therefore they’ll write by drawing and labeling the drawing. Help these youngsters hear medial and final sounds! 8 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Your students will be generating approximately 3 booklets a week. As always when getting ready for celebrating, the students will each choose one piece to revise, edit and make beautiful. You can demonstrate that writers reread the writing they’ve chosen to revise, checking above all that it makes sense. Children can add details to their stories and revise by adding more to the important parts. Another revision technique you may want to demonstrate is writing endings that stay close to the heart of the story. For example, instead of a child writing, “Mom put a Band-Aid on my knee and then we went home,” she can think about the end of that moment and write the exact words of what happened: “Mom put a Band-Aid on my knee. She gave me a kiss and I felt much better.” Once children revise and do some beginning editing they will be ready to share their writing with an audience.

9 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 December

Unit 4 – Writing for Readers: Teaching Skills and Strategies Prior to this unit, we will have acted as if children’s approximations of letters and words are fine and dandy. We’ve reveled in their approximations. This study, however, begins with us confessing to our children that we sometimes have a hard time reading their writing. It’s as if we let the cat out of the bag. “I took your wonderful stories home last night,” we say, “And I sat down to read them. But do you know what… I read a bit and then, I got stuck. I couldn’t figure out what the story was supposed to say! Has that ever happened to any of you?” Until now, we’ve so wanted our children to feel good as writers that we have hidden our struggles to translate their spindly letters into meaning. The problem with this is that the only reason children will care about spelling, punctuation or white space is that these conventions make it easier for others to read and to appreciate their texts! It’s crucial, therefore, that as soon as a child is remotely approximating writing in ways a reader could conceivably read, we let children in on the truth. If we’re going to tell children that sometimes we can’t read their writing that until now we’ve accepted with open arms… we need to do this in ways which don’t cause our children to despair. Our goal is to spotlight the importance of spelling and punctuation by designing a unit of study which makes word walls, blends, and capital letters into the talk of the town. To start this unit, invite children to sort through their writing folder, creating two piles – one of readable and one of virtually unreadable writing. Teach them to look specifically at their handwriting, spaces between words, punctuation and spelling. Then tell children you’ll help them make their writing more readable. Specifically, you’ll teach children how to use the resources in your classroom to build a repertoire for spelling tricky words. Your writers may already know that they can say a word, say it slowly and write what they hear. You may also use some of the following prompts in conferences or small group strategy lessons: “Say the word. Listen to what you hear at the beginning/end. Do you know another word that has that same sound at the beginning/end?” “Say the word. Do you know another word that sounds like that word?” Use that word to write the new word.” “Say the word. You know how to spell that. It is on our word wall! Write it quickly.” You will want to use these same prompts during Interactive Writing and Word Study. It will be important for these young writers to transfer all that they are learning in these other components (letter and sound relationships, spelling patterns, and word families) into their independent writing. For example, you’ll teach a lesson early on that explicitly demonstrates how to stretch out a word, saying it slowly to hear all the sounds. Some teachers even demonstrate by holding a rubber band in their fingers and stretching it bit by bit as they say the word slowly, to physically “stretch” the word. 10 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007

You’ll teach children to use the word wall to write familiar words “in a snap,” by looking at the word on the word wall, and then writing it quickly on the page. You’ll show children how to listen closely to their words to notice when there are no more sounds, and to put a space about the size of a finger before beginning a new word. In your conferences, you’ll celebrate each small step along the way – a child who notices that she needs spaces between words, another who notices letters that are scrunched up, a child who tries to add more sounds and letters to his writing. You may still have many students who need work on making spaces between their words. You can have them try to leave finger spaces, to lift their pens over to make a new word, or you can teach them to make a line for each word in their sentences. For example, a student may want to write, “Suddenly I saw my mom!” You can say the sentence with the child and make a line for each word she says: ______ ______ ______ ______ ______. Have the student say the sentence again, pointing at the lines. This will also reinforce and begin to teach her where a word begins and ends. It will eventually help with one to one matching in reading. Meanwhile, remind children to make sure their small moment stories are tightly focused chronological stories that incorporate story language and structure into their writing. Teach students that they can make a whole story out of one page in their booklet, zooming in on the most important part of the story and making sure it all makes sense. Toward the end of the unit, ask children to write so that their peers can read what they have written. This big step will require you to teach children how to be good writing partners. Remind children to give friendly tips and compliments, and to ask questions as they share and revise their work together. Teach children how to carefully listen to or read their partner’s work to make sure there aren’t any words missing. Teach them to help each other with tricky words (without just spelling these for their partner) by stretching out sounds with a partner and then handing the paper over to the writer to make changes. Children learn to be “word wall detectives” together, searching for word wall words in a partner’s writing to circle and help the partner find the correct spelling. Finally, you’ll celebrate all the hard work your children have done by teaching them to sort their work once again into harder to read and easier to read piles. Then, each writer will choose one easy to read piece to celebrate. Some teachers set up a celebration where the children takes turns being writers sharing their writing, and readers listening to their classmates’ stories. This sort of celebration gives children the opportunity to observe changes in one another’s writing since the beginning of the unit and to offer congratulations on how far they’ve come.

11 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 January

Unit 5 - Writers Write for Many Purposes Throughout the Day and Across the World In this unit, children will begin to see that writing can be used to convey many messages that are seen everywhere - from their homes, to their classroom, to their school, and beyond. They will learn what writing in different genre(s) looks and sounds like, and they will learn that writers write all day long, across our whole lives, for real purposes. Typically, this unit begins with two parts. First, you will invite children to look around them to notice the many jobs that writing does in the world. Children may take a tour of their classroom, noticing the charts, signs, labels, and the poem that hangs nearby the door. “These signs and labels, charts and poems help people. Signs can help you find your way. Charts can show you how to do something. Poems can tell you about the things we love and care about in the world. When writers write, we share important information with our community. You, too, can write in all these ways!” you might say, issuing a grand invitation for them to write for a variety of purposes. Then, you want children to imagine the possible ways they can put their own writing into the world. “Can you think about what we might need to tell people or share with people in our community?” you might ask. One child might say he wants people to know where all the things to take care of the fish are – where the fish food is, where the cleaning tools are, where the net is – and decide to make labels for the fish center. Another child might say, “Children need to bring really important things to school so I’ll make a list of all the things we need to bring to school because sometimes we forget.” Another might want to make a sign to tell children not to shout during writer’s workshop, and decide to make a “Don’t shout” sign. Early in the unit you’ll want to teach children how to match their purpose with their paper choice. Paper with space for a picture and one line underneath can be used for signs, and index cards can be used for labeling important objects. You’ll add new varieties of paper to accentuate the new possibilities and hope that the writing projects children do in school spill over into their homes. Almost inevitably, some children will think writers’ workshop is now all about making one sign, so a particular challenge will be to keep these children going. You’ll emphasize that writing workshop time is for writing, and that children can make many signs or labels or that they can always write stories. This unit often merges writing workshop with students’ study of community. Writing cards to classmates helps us to make friends and making signs for the school helps us to learn about the ways that the community takes care of its members. Some teachers invite community members of the school like the principal and the custodian into classrooms for an interview. Students can ask questions about what the school community needs. A principal might say, “We have a lost and found and children don’t know what is in it. Some children don’t even know where it is.” Or she might say, “We need children to know how to find the bathroom.” A school custodian might talk about how the school 12 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 cafeteria needs to be cleaner: “I have a really big problem – children don’t throw away the garbage.” Teachers can take children to visit different places in the school to think about possible pieces of writing they can create to help improve the school community. For example, some children may make “Up” and “Down” signs for staircases, “Please Clean Up” signs for the cafeteria, “How to Dress Warmly” lists by the door to the playground. The many purposes for writing help children to see writing as a social activity, something that makes us closer to the people around us. Children may write to congratulate family members, or to keep in touch with old friends. Children in this unit may begin to keep a class mailbox for the letters they’re writing. They may want to write post cards and letters to family members near or far, telling them about what is happening in their lives. They may be getting ready to move or going shopping for new clothes and want to make a list of things they need. At this point you will want students to open their minds wide and see all the possibilities of where their ideas can make it into the world. The classroom is a microcosm of their worlds, and children will come up with their own great inventions for the kind of writing they would like to do. They shouldn’t be discouraged from doing this, even if you haven’t yet done a mini-lesson on it. As children work on these very important writing projects, audience becomes increasingly important. “Your writing can’t do its job unless people can read it!” you might say. And so you’ll help children continue their work for more sophisticated temporary spellings, increasing use of sight words, spacing and other conventions that will allow others to read the important messages they have written. Have them make signs, labels, etc. so as to communicate with the classroom, making their writing so other children can read it – stretching out all letters and sounds, rereading, working with a partner to test to see if they can make their writing more readable. Encourage children to continue to make pictures and to label their pictures. Have them work on stretching out sounds and hearing the medial sounds in words, and continue to work on spelling. This unit ends with students showing the project they have been making for the classroom and school community and with them thinking about pieces of writing they might make for their friends and families. Writing Partnerships at Midyear In the new year, we will want to build on what students already know about working in a partnership. We will want to revisit how partners rehearse their writing, reread and fix their writing together, and find parts that they like and that are important. In the next few units, students will be making writing that talks to the community and teaches them different things. In Writing For Many Purposes, for example students will be making signs. One student may write, “No running in the hallways.” You will want to teach partners how they can ask each other, “Why did you make this sign?” or “Where will you put this sign?” Students will work on discussing their purposes behind their various writing projects. 13 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 As students begin to be able to read more leveled texts, they can also read each others’ pieces. You will want to teach kids to practice reading their pieces with each other. Partners will say, “Let me see if I can read this sign.” Or ask, “What does this say?”

14 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 February

Unit 6 – Nonfiction Writing: How-To Books or Author your own unit of study Teachers may choose to teach students to write How-To books in this unit. If this is what you want your students to do, then you will want to study the unit that follows now. This is also a good time, though, for teachers to author their own unit of study, as writing workshop is flourishing. If you want to author a new unit, you may choose to look down to the next heading, for some suggestions. To begin a unit on How-Tos, tell children that writers not only use their writing to tell the rich stories of their lives, but also to teach others. Writers can teach all-about a topic, in which case the writing is informational, or they can teach people how-to do something, in which case the writing is procedural. This unit focuses on the latter. The world is filled with “procedural” writing – cookbooks, instructions for new toys and games, craft projects to make….and so on. You’ll want to immerse children in the sounds of these texts by choosing a few to read aloud and study, examining how writers use their words and pictures to teach readers. Some good models of procedural books include “How to Carve a Pumpkin” in The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons, or How to Make a Bird Feeder by Liyala Tuckfield (Rigby Literacy). You can also use an example from My Big Backyard (a magazine for yournger children from Ranger Rick). In this unit we invite children to become not only writers but also teachers and then suggest that they use writing as a way to teach others. We help them to teach others howto-do something by writing books in which they draw and then tell about a sequence of steps they hope the learner will take. This kind of procedural writing requires explicitness, clarity, sequence and that writers write in a way that anticipates what their readers will need to know. Just as you used storytelling to help writers develop language that more closely matches the language of good storytellers, you’ll want to coach students to tell and retell class activities in ways that teach others. They can teach each other how to brush their teeth, get ready for school, or make chocolate milk. Teach children not only to use ordinary words to organize their thinking but also that writers use very specific language when they’re teaching. A writer wouldn’t just write, “Get toothpaste.” Instead, he’d write, “Squirt toothpaste onto the toothbrush.” One of these how-to texts can be written into a class book during interactive or shared writing. After students practice on whole class topics, they can begin rehearsing their own howto’s. Encourage them to use words like ‘first,’ ‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘afterwards,’ ‘before,’ ‘finally,’ ‘last,’ is important as these convey timing and order. We also want children to think about the precise words they use to convey actions. If a student writes, “Then you put the chocolate in the milk,” have her think about how she does it, or actually demonstrate the action. Chances are the word ‘pour’ will come to her mind. We want children thinking about and using all the words they know to convey precisely what to do and how to do it.

15 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 You’ll want to help your students think of things they could teach others. These will likely be simple things that students do every day, such as ‘How to Make a Good Pancake’ or ‘How to Teach Your Dog to Roll Over.’ For now, steer your more struggling students away from difficult procedures; tackling these at this stage will only frustrate them. You will want to teach students that in order to write procedural texts, they need to envision the steps they go through when they perform a given task, seeing it “like a movie in their minds,” and then write each step they saw in their “movie.” Often, students will leave out big steps or assume their readers know more than they do. It helps to have students pretend to act out the steps a writer has detailed—ask one partner to read the steps and the other to follow them. During this unit, you will continue having writing partnerships confer with one another to check each other’s writing for sense. You will also teach children how to listen to each other’s writing in order to follow the steps laid out to see if they work. This is important because it will show the writer the effect his choice of words and steps have on a reader. This will help the writer revise and make his text more precise. As in every unit, children will continue to use what they know about letters, sounds and sight words to increase the number of words they write as well as the complexity of their spelling. At this time of the year, children will have control over some sight words and will be able to use the word wall to edit the high frequency words in their writing. They will be motivated to take on this big work because they will soon share their ‘How to’ with their readers, the people who will learn from this important non-fiction writing. Be sure to encourage students to turn their labels into sentences and to use spaces between their words. As students begin revising their pieces, you’ll want them to examine their ‘how tos’ for clarity, perhaps thinking more about how readers might perform certain steps. For example a student who writes “Put the cookies into the oven” might ask herself, “How? How should I put the cookies in the oven?” Then the writer can imagine what is happening: “I tell my mom, ‘Help me.’ My mom holds the cookie sheet. I open the door carefully. She slides the cookie sheet in. We close the door together slowly.” As they revise, young writers can begin incorporating further conventions of the ‘how to’ genre, such as making their pictures teach even more by eliminating extraneous details, zooming in close on the part of the picture that teaches, and using labels and arrows in their pictures. Celebrate students’ hard work by creating centers where students can teach a small group of people how-to perform their task, visit younger students and become their “Teacherfor-a-Day,” or hang their ‘How tos’ in the hallway with a stapled example of actual materials used or a finished product beside it.

16 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Author Your Own Unit: Literary Non-Fiction; Rewriting Our Versions of Fairy Tales; Letters; Songs; and Scripts We encourage you to start off the new year by teaching a unit of study that you and your colleagues co-author together. In early December, we’ll lead conference days designed to help you author your own unit of study, and we hope you do so in this month, and then share your unit-of-study with others so that your thinking becomes part of the foundational knowledge that all of us, as a community, draw upon year after year. In March, teachers may want to teach a second one of these optional units, and this time hopefully your teaching can stand on the shoulders of work other teachers have invented during this January Unit-of-Study. When you author a unit of study, think first about what your students will actually be doing in the unit. Will they each write one mega-text (as we’ve become accustomed to students doing when they write All-About books) or will they write a folder-full of texts, revising some of these? Then, think about the muscles that want to support as children do this work. For example, you might tell children that the unit of study is in song writing, but really, your goals might be for children to learn more about reading-writing connections and revision, or, alternatively, about literary language. In every unit, children will progress through the writing process, rehearsing, drafting, revising and editing. In every unit, children will depend on their understanding of the qualities of good writing. Eudora Welty once said, “Poetry is the school I went to in order to learn to write prose.” In this unit, your children might be writing adaptations of fairy tales or they might be writing songs…. but they will be writing whatever they write in order to learn to write any kind of text as well as possible. We will support you in thinking about authoring the units of study described below (you can be sure we will involve some of you in helping to imagine how these might conceivably go!) but of course, you may fashion other units of study that we have yet to imagine. Choose just one of these options! Option A: Literary Non-fiction Option B: Rewriting our Own Versions of Fairy Tales Option C: Letters Option D: Songs Option E: Scripts Literary Non Fiction The world of non-fiction writing is an enormous one, and in this unit, children will be encouraged to write in all the many forms of non-fiction writing that they find in the world. The unit begins with children reading non-fiction texts as insiders, thinking, “How do these texts tend to go?” and making piles of each representing a different way that non-fiction texts tend to go. 17 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 For example, children will find that many writers chronicle the story of their coming-toknow about a topic. The resulting texts are sometimes referred to as I-search (as opposed to re-search) texts. You’ll see these books on the shelves of any library. A professional writer might write about how he came to investigate a colony of gorillas, or the writer might chronicle her trip to the Statue of Liberty, weaving information about the Statue into the text. Then, too, children will find that non-fiction writers often pose and then answer questions. Many writers of non-fiction books pattern their texts. While children develop a sense of the array of options before them, they can meanwhile brainstorm in order to decide upon an arena of expertise they want to teach others. As children did earlier in the year with writing all about books, they can think, “What do I know a lot about?” and they can list possible sub-topics they could include when addressing any one topic. This time, however, it is conceivable that teachers may steer children to write about a topic the class has studied during Social Studies or Science. For example, each child could conceivably be writing about the culture and geography of another country, or about the earth, or animals. Perhaps most importantly, children can study beautiful picture books, noticing the craft that powerful non-fiction writers use. These children will study authors such as Joanne Ryder, Katherine Lasky, Karla Kushkin, and Jane Yolen, noticing their choice of words, their use of precise detail, their fondness for surprising facts, and children can write their own non-fiction picture books, aspiring to write equally well. This unit will also help children to be more skilled and more flexible readers of nonfiction texts. The unit will help children read these texts, noticing how they are structured. That is, a reader of non-fiction will read differently if this is a narrative, or if this is a question-answer text. This unit will help children appreciate and notice the full diversity of non-fiction writing. Adaptations of Fairy Tales and Folk Tales Teachers who love children’s literature are well-versed in fairy tales and folk tales. Adaptations of Cinderella and The Three Little Pigs fill our book shelves, and we’ve loved hearing the familiar tales told from new points of view and seeing them situated in new settings. Children, however, are less well-versed in fairy tales and folk tales, and many of them have yet to make the spectacular discovery that the same tale can be told in many ways. This unit allows children to study adaptations of fairy tales in an especially intense and purposeful way—as authors who will, themselves, create their own wild and wonderful adaptations. The unit will rely upon previous read-alouds which immerse children in different versions of a particular fairy tale. One class, for example, may have heard the teacher read and reread a traditional version of The Three Little Pigs and then Scieska’s version, told from the point of view of the wolf. Those children, then, might imagine other ways 18 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 to adapt this story. What if the story involved dogs instead of pigs? What if it were set in New York City and not the country—would the pigs build homes? Or bridges? What if the story had maintained its rural setting but the pigs had been kinder to the wolf? That is—one point of this unit is to help children know ways in which one plot line can be tweaked, stretched, twisted so as to create a host of other stories or adaptations. Of course, teachers can encourage children to think critically about fairy tales, reconsidering whether the hero (or the villain) needs to be a boy, whether it’s the girl who needs to saved by a boy, etc. Meanwhile, however, there is another goal to this unit. When children are invited to borrow and adapt a story they know well, this allows them to use the initial story (and its literary syntax) as a scaffold for their own emerging abilities as storytellers and story writers. That is, a second goal of this unit is to help children incorporate literary language into their writing. This includes writing to create a mood, to develop a scene, to build tension, to dramatize a character. Then, too, we are confident that children will make lots of reading and writing connections when their writing is so closely allied to their reading. A word of caution: This unit MUST invite each child to create his or her very own text. Of course the classroom community will grow ideas together, but the goal is not conformity but creativity. Be sure the child progresses through the writing process as usual; that is, that each writer plans, drafts and revises each of the stories he or she writes. Build a World for Writing: Letter Writing and a Post Office; Song Writing and a Jamboree; Script Writing and a Theater Troupe This optional unit of study gives teachers and children across a grade-level a chance to tackle a writing project and to build a world in which literacy makes all the difference. Some groups of teachers may decide to tackle a letter writing effort, others will take on song writing or script writing, still other teachers will take on something that has yet to be imagined! Either way, teachers will show children how writers go about learning to do a new kind of writing. That is, whatever the genre might be, writers will learn to collect examples of that kind of writing, to notice what those writers tend to do, to imagine the life those writers probably led that allowed them to do this writing…and then children will set out to live similar writerly lives. In some classrooms, children will write letters. Letter writing begins, of course, with believing you have something to say to someone that can make a difference. Perhaps children will first think hard about ways in which we can say those age-old things—I love you, thanks a lot, I wish you the best, good bye, I miss you, here is my news. Of course, these children will be writing in the form which is sometimes referred to as “the friendly letter” but hopefully this time, the instruction will not focus simply on the salutations and the address! Instead, teach children that when we think hard about the person to whom we write, our words can be ones which reach straight to the heart. Teach children too, that details matter, and that audience-awareness begins in this most intimate content. 19 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Of course, if you decide to teach children to write letters, you will also want to teach children that persuasive letters can make a real-world difference. Tell children stories of the class in New Hampshire that proposed a state-animal and ended up addressing the state assembly. Tell children stories about children who have protested when a park was being turned into parking lot and actually managed to save a patch of earth. Teach children that in order to make a real-world impact, writers need to think very carefully about the arguments that will convince this particular audience, addressing counter arguments. They also need to realize that anecdotes have the power to touch and move people, and to embed anecdotes into arguments, doing so in ways that evoke a response. Songs Songs permeate the environment in which our kids live. Our children are immersed in the songs they hear on the radio, the songs that accompany television shows, the lullabies their grandma sings to them. Some children can recite the lyrics of a song quicker than they can remember their own addresses! If we remind children that songs are literature, just like the stories and poems they write in the writing workshop, then we can use the tune, language, and rhythm in songs to draw our children towards the world of literary language. How important it is to teach kids that they, too, can create beautiful and powerful lyrics…and that these lyrics can reflect the truths of their own lives. We can energize our classrooms so that our students are clapping, humming and memorizing the literary language from each other’s songs. To author this unit, you may want to reread your notes on a poetry writing workshop and think, “How is this the same? How is this different?” Certainly, you will want to be sure to emphasize that songs, like all writing that children do during the writing workshop, need to convey content that matters. Invite children to write songs about things that matter to them. They can write songs about the things that happen to them, the ways they feel, the things they know all about. In your unit, you may teach children that rhythm can help us structure a song, and how choruses create cohesion (you may not use that term!). Children can create raps, lullabies, rock songs, or ballads. Youngsters can create songs of protest, songs of happiness, songs celebrating city life. Many children will already have a tune in mind (like Twinkle Twinkle) and write a song to fit that tune. Other kids will write their lyrics and then later add a tune or beat that seem to match the song. After kids have created many songs, you may decide to invite each child to choose a few songs to create his or her own “album.” They may conceivably celebrate by passing out lyrics and teaching each other how their songs can be sung, or by putting their songs to music using those wonderful xylophones that some schools still have!

20 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 Scripts Young children are born entertainers. They love dressing up, taking on roles, using funny voices and acting things out. If you give children a chance to both write and direct their very own life stories, while also performing in plays written by their classmates, you will no doubt be a big hit! You can tell children that for this unit, they’ll be playwrights, putting their lives into scenes on the page and then onto the stage. In this unit of study, remind children to bring all they know about stories, characters, and dramatization to their writing. For this kind of writing, teach children that they’ll write both dialogue and stage directions. Children will need to capture dialogue between characters. Young playwrights will decide small, precise actions that children will incorporate into their plays, weaving together action and discipline. Teach children that actors often exaggerate their facial expressions and words to prompt reactions from the audience. You can also teach children to bring viewers into the world of their plays by describing where their stories take place (some children might opt to have a narrator announce the play’s setting: “A sunny afternoon at the playground” or “A snowy hill in the middle of winter, morning.”) Encourage children to draw on their imaginations when they do this. Tell them that playwrights often successfully convey their stories through settings with minimal backdrops and props. You might want to limit the number of props children can use, suggesting that they think of inventive ways to use one thing – a chair, perhaps – to represent many things in their stories. Once they’ve written first drafts of a play, young playwrights will work in partnerships to make sure their dialogue sounds true to life, that actors can follow the cues in the scripts and the audience can settle into the landscape of the play. Toward the end of this unit, playwrights will gather up a set of actors for their play and rehearse the script, thinking about the dialogue, the actions on stage, and the backdrop. As a final celebration, each group of actors will perform for the entire class. You’ll want to encourage children to be quiet during performances, keeping their eyes on the stage and their hands in their laps. You can tell them that at the end of the performance, when the actors take a bow, they’ll have a chance to clap and shout out “Bravo” or “Hoorah.”

21 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007

March

Unit 7 – Nonfiction Writing: All-About Books Procedural writing isn’t the only way writers teach; they can also teach all about a topic on which they are experts. As you teach this, the unit shifts so that children will each write one long All-About book on a topic of his or her choice. Rather than have children research a new topic, as you’ll teach them to do later on in the year, you can first help children develop new, important non-narrative writing muscles through first exploring the places they go, the things they care about and the things they do can as topics which they can teach others. In books such as ‘All About School’ and ‘All About Kittens’ students can easily access content about the things they love or do every day, while focusing on learning how to organize and develop their facts. Children will each write a few All-About books on topics of their choice. You will encourage students to choose topics about which they are both passionate and knowledgeable. Sometimes finding a good topic takes practice. Often children think they know a lot on a topic they saw on a TV show. Or they confuse what they want to know about, like the moon – because they like it a great deal – with something they also like and in fact know well, like birthday parties. They can use graphic organizers such as a web to write down all they know about a topic. Children can try out a few topics to see which one will yield the most information and make the most interesting topic. Once students have chosen an everyday topic on which they are ‘experts,’ they need to impose an organizational structure on everything they know about that topic. All-about books are written in chapters; one way for children to organize and plan for their books is to develop a Table of Contents. You might have them make a picture in their mind of their topic and then think, “What are the parts of my topic?” The chapter titles in a book about soccer might be ‘Soccer Balls,’ ‘Soccer Teams,’ ‘Goalies.’ Or students might ask themselves, “What are different times in my topic?” In this case, the chapter titles might be ‘Soccer Practice’ or ‘Soccer Games.’ This table of contents page will usually be revised as the unit goes on and again at the end of the unit. (Writers don’t always know everything they’ll write before they begin!) It’s helpful if you are modeling and practicing these strategies for students by writing a class book together about a topic the whole class knows, perhaps ‘All About Our School’ or ‘All About Winter.’ Next children will begin writing their “chapters.” Pages can be formatted differently to support different ways of organizing informational writing. For example, if a child is writing ‘All about Dogs’ and one page is on ‘Training Your Dog to Heel,’ that page will be formulated as a procedural text, and will look much like a ‘How to’ paper did. Teach children to notice and add to their books a few other text features of non-fiction writing, such as headings, diagrams, charts, glossaries or a page that shows different kinds of that topic, such as ‘Different Kinds of Dogs.’ You can teach your more proficient writers how to further develop the facts within each section of their book. If a student is writing a chapter titled ‘A Dog’s Body,’ and he writes “Dogs have two ears,” before he goes on to “Dogs have two eyes,” help this child 22 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 elaborate and say more about his first statement. Teach him to think, “Hmm… How can I say more about dog ears? Well, they’re pointy and when dogs are surprised or upset, their ears point straight up!” You also might teach him to add his own voice into the text by writing a fact and then responding to it: “A dog’s tongue is long and pink. When it licks your hand, it feels wet and sticky. Yuck!” Again, it’s important to model and practice these strategies with readers through shared writing of whole class books. When students have collected a number of pages and chapters for their book, they’re ready to revise. Students can revise by elaborating more on their facts to try to envision what their readers might be confused about, or by responding to questions from a partner. They can also check each chapter for clarity by rereading their pages, stopping after each sentence to think, “Does this go with this chapter?” and if it doesn’t, take it out. Students can revise their pictures to teach their readers more by “zooming in” on specific details or adding labels. Students can also study non-fiction texts and find new ways to revise their pieces based on what “real authors” have done, such as adding “teaching words” (e.g. “for example” or “on the other hand”). They also will most likely be revising their table of contents to match what they’ve actually accomplished in the unit. As your class gets ready to publish, keep in mind that children need not publish all of the pages they’ve created. Perhaps they’d like to pick just the 4 or 5 “best” chapters to place in their books. Children are the world’s best collectors. Just as they love to collect and categorize sea shells, pretty stones, toy cars, and stickers, they love learning that writers collect ideas and information about a topic and sorting it into categories – or chapters. This, combined with children’s natural curiosity and their eagerness to pose as experts, makes this unit of study a popular one.

23 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 April

Unit 8 – Poetry Poetry allows writers to let their hearts and minds soar. It also lets children practice all that they’ve learned thus far in the year. That is, young poets will find significance in the ordinary details of their lives, employ strategies of revision, and learn from mentor authors in order to write many, many poems. In this way poetry will not be an esoteric unit of study done to end the year, so much as a culmination of a year’s learning and an opportunity to use language in extraordinary ways. This unit begins with a week of poetry centers. During this week, children are not actually writing poetry; instead, they work in centers which provide them the opportunity to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of poetry. In one center, children will observe everyday objects, such as rocks, seashells, and math manipulatives with a poet’s eye, by drawing and writing what they see in a fresh way. For example, a child might say a green feather is like a mini tree. In another center, each child will read poems with beautiful imagery, such as “Silence” by Eve Merriam, and then draw or paint what he sees in his mind’s eye. You might hang your students’ paintings or sketches next to the poem they each illustrated, marveling at how all of their images are different. Another center could set children up to collect their favorite poems and to paste these into their very own poetry anthologies. In a beautiful language center, children can pull out their favorite literary lines from picture books and write these on sentence strips or book marks. A child in a classroom that had one such center used the book The Moon Was the Best by Charlotte Zolotow and Tana Hoban, and wrote the line, “The fountains sprayed water in a curving white mist over prancing horses.” Once children begin to write poems, you can help them learn that their poems can be filled with meaningful topics and feelings. They revive their “Tiny-Topic Notepads” from the Authors as Mentors unit and use these to find poems hiding in the details of their lives. Teach children how to experiment with powerful uses of language, using line breaks to convey meaning. You might put each word from a class poem created during shared writing on index cards, and then show the class through a pocket chart that changing the placement of the words changes the feeling of the poem. By the end of this study, your poets will be able to create clear images with precise and extravagant language. They’ll think about the difference between ‘fry’ and ‘sizzle,’ ‘shine’ and ‘sparkle,’ ‘cry’ and ‘weep.’ You’ll teach children to make comparisons as a way to give their readers pictures in their minds. You’ll show them how poets use language and metaphors to convey the meaning and feeling behind their poems. Writing Partnerships in the Spring Your kindergarten writing partnerships are growing. You will want your students to think and talk like writers in your classrooms. Building on what they have been working on in their partnerships in reading as well as writing, teach kids how partners ask questions about the writing they are doing. During the unit of study on poetry, one partner might ask, “Why did you put that word alone on that line?” Or “Where is your 24 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 feeling in this poem?” During the unit of study on authors as mentors, a partner might ask, “What are you trying to show?” Or “Why did you do that?” By posing these sorts of questions, your students are learning ways that we as teachers talk to our young writers. Kindergarteners at this time of year are ready to slip into the shoes of the “teacher” and to act their way through it. In this role, partners will be encouraged to ask each other to say more. Using the kids themselves to push and stretch each other’s voices to say more will help them develop their oral language skills and craft of writing.

25 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 May

Unit 9 – The Craft of Revision: Authors as Mentors Writing is a powerful tool for thinking precisely because when we write, we can take fleeting and intangible memories, insights and images, and make them concrete. When we talk, our thoughts float away. When we write, we put our thoughts onto paper. We can stick them in our pocket. We can come back to them later. We can reread our first thoughts and see gaps in them. We can look again and see connections between two different sets of ideas. Through rereading and revision, writing becomes a tool for thinking. A commitment to revision is part and parcel of a commitment to teach writing as a process. Watch a child at work making something—anything—and one sees revision. The child pats a ball of clay into a pancake to make a duck pond, and then revises the duck pond by creating a fingertip rainstorm that dapples the water surface. Young children revise block castles to add protected hiding spots for archers, and they revise pictures of spaceships to add explosions. They revise clay rabbits to make one ear droop. Young children can revise their writing with equal ease and enthusiasm—as long as we don’t expect their revisions to look like those a grown-up would make. Kindergarteners can revise—as long as we expect their five-year-old best! The beauty of this unit comes when our students see how their writing gets stronger because of the many ways they learn to revise. During revision, we introduce children to additional materials and tools. Tell children that part of the fun is using their very own special tools! Giving children a revision folder and a color pen usually motivates them to bring zealous energy to the job of revising writing. You will want to be sure that children have access to strips of paper to add sentences and sections into the middle of their writing, flaps of paper to tape over neglected parts of the paper, and single sheets of paper to staple onto the end or the middle parts of their stories. You may also want your children to have access to post-it notes, tape, staplers and scissors during writing workshop. At the beginning of this unit, children learn that revision is a compliment to good work. The unit can begin with children selecting their best pieces from the fall. It is important for you to decide if your students can read these pieces and will be able to revise them. If so, then the work continues by putting these pieces in a special revision folder, then revising each one further. Children learn revision strategies, including cutting, stapling, adding into the middle of a page, re-sequencing. It is important to teach students not only the physical work of revision, but also the reasons for altering a draft. Adding details is an important part of revision. Show children how to reread their pieces thinking about which part is the most important. Often, this part will be the very thing that made them want to tell their story in the first place. If children are having a hard time figuring out the most important part of a story, they might ask themselves, ‘Where in my story do I have the biggest feelings?’ This is the part we want students to stretch out with details that spotlight what makes this moment so essential. For example, a student rereading a story he wrote about swinging on the monkey bars, might realize that the 26 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 most important part that happened was when he slipped and fell. This, then, is the part of the story he will want to further develop, adding in dialogue and small actions that show his feelings. You can always, of course, remind your writers of previous revision strategies they used in Small Moments and Writing for Readers. If, after you assess your students writing you decide they will not be able to revise pieces from the fall because their writing was too small or they no longer remember the story they were telling, you may decide to make the first week of this unit a time for children to write new small moment stories. Children can spend this first week exploring the idea of living like an author and using tiny topic notepads to collect moments from their lives to begin writing these stories. Once students have these new pieces they can be introduced to the revision tools and folders. As the unit progresses, children will be studying an author and revising their writing using the author’s craft. The most important message we give to children during a writing workshop is this, “You are writers, like writers the world over.” It makes sense, then, that for at least one unit of study, children are invited to look closely at the work of one writer and let that writer function as a mentor. The mentor author you choose will help students revise their writing. When choosing the whole-class mentor author, you will decide if you want this unit to continue the emphasis on writing personal narratives (or small moments) or instead to broaden the class’ repertoire by launching children to do other kinds of writing. Many teachers in our community have decided to select an author who writes at least one or two texts which are rather like the small moment stories the children have been writing, so that at the start of the unit children can use the author to mentor them in this work. But it is also wonderful if the author writes other kinds of texts, too. The unit of study, then, might begin with an author’s small moment stories and then move to his or her other kinds of writing. We recommend these authors, among others, as ones who write very short small moment stories and other texts which could be wonderful exemplar for children. Be sure to select a different author than the first and second grade teachers in your school. Angela Johnson Ezra Jack Keats Joanne Ryder Donald Crews

Joshua’s Night Whispers then move to The Leaving Morning, and Do Like Kyla then move to Peter’s Chair The Snowy Day then move to My Father’s Hands One Small Fish then move to Night at the Fair Shortcut

The class explores how this author lives as a writer, the themes the author tends to write about and above all the author’s crafting techniques. Then students use some of these same techniques in their own writing. Meanwhile, you’ll use your mentor author’s books to marvel over the way he or she chooses and stretches out one small moment, instead of running from moment to 27 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007 moment. You’ll ask students, “What do you notice that Ezra has done in his writing? Why do you suppose he did that?” Your final and most important question, of course, is “Can you try using that technique in your own writing?” Then students will try these techniques in their own writing. They will revise trying something that they noticed their mentor author used. While studying the texts in detail, you and your children might notice that your mentor author uses punctuation to grow suspense (ellipses, dash marks or commas), or that some pages of the story are a “close up” like in Snowy Day when the snow falls on Peter, or the use of sound words to pull your attention to something important like in Sail Away by Donald Crews. We don’t want our young writers necessarily choosing similar topics as our mentor author as much as we want them to use similar techniques to make their own stories come alive in the most vivid way.

28 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.

Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Kindergarten Writing Curricular Calendar 2006-2007

June

Unit 10 – Writers Live a Writerly Life and Make Plans for Writing Projects All year long, you will have convened children around writing projects that you and other teachers have invented. Now is the time to gather your youngsters together and to tell them that for the whole next month, they’ll have a chance to invent their own writing projects. “You know how earlier in the year, I suggested that we could all write small moment stories? And then I suggested we could all study an author and try to write like that author? Well now it is your time to invent your own wonderful ideas for the sort of writing you’d like to do.” Before you issue this invitation, think a bit about the choices you hope children make because of course, it is very easy to steer children. Do you hope children reflect on all the kinds of writing they’ve studied together and select one of those kinds of writing to now work on with independence? Or do you hope children pore over texts that they find in their world thinking, ‘I could write just like that!’ Do you hope children take on a cause—say, convincing the school to spruce up the playground—and that they write in order to make a read world difference. You will be able to channel children towards whatever it is you imagine, and therefore take the time to think through your priorities. In any case, in this unit, children will not all progress in step with each other through a synchronized writing process. This means that you will need to teach children that they need to be their own writing teachers, giving themselves assignments. Their first step, for example, will be to choose (or design) the kind of paper that makes sense for the writing project the child has in mind. Remind them that writers always take time to plan for writing, to write rough drafts, to revise our writing, and then to edit our writing. Remind children that sometimes writers take on the project of writing one very long and involved writing project, one which requires days and days of work, and that other times writers collect folders full of writing, then select our best and especially revise our best work. Although every child will be working on very different projects, you’ll still find lots of room for instruction. For example, every writer always finds it helpful to have a mentor text beside us as we write and to think, “What did this other author do that worked well?” “How could I borrow that strategy in my own writing?” Children can also be reminded that the characteristics of good writing are fairly stable across genre. Whether they are writing directions or writing songs, it is important to write with precise, exact words, to reread to make sure the meaning is clear, to answer readers’ questions as one writes. One of the great joys of this unit will be the fact that children will emerge as different, one from the next. You will definitely want to capitalize on this. If one child writes a gigantic book of jokes and another writes a screen play, let each child become famous for what he or she has done, developing the identity of “I am a particular kind of writer.” Teach children that whenever they write for readers, they need to make sure they write with punctuation, that they spell words as completely as they can. 29 Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Copyright 2006-2007 NYC Regions 3, 4, 8, 9 & 10 may duplicate these for educators with whom TCRWP will be working next year only.