Research in Kindergarten, Part 3

After we did our research it was time to write. I put the kids in groups so that it would be easier to help them and they would be able to help each other. I put the kids in 3 groups, introduction page, animal page and places page. We first worked on drawing our pictures.

In our class this year we have talked a lot about illustration and how they help tell the story. I LOVE Katie Wood Ray's book In Pictures, In Words. It really talks about how young writers carry a message in their illustrations and helping them understand that they are telling a story through thier illustratons. I think as the year as progressed that they were able to write more detailed writing, because they had started the year thinking about how to add details to thier pictures.
 

Anyways...they began with working on pictures with labels. We have talked about how we can not take anything from our schema file, but rather everything needs to come from our book. So we put all of our research and books on the carpet at the front of the room, so when kids needed to, they were able to go back and look at the research. After creating the picture, outlining it in black marker, and coloring we were ready to move onto writing.

They were still in thier groups. Again this helped with management and they were able to help each other. The group that was working on introduction is the group that tends to struggle. They were able to get a lot more support and one on one attention, by putting them all together. We talked about how we start our sentences and writing simple sight words. The other groups were pretty much able to do this independently. We talked about expanding our sentences and how we could make them more interesting. ( RL.K.1f)

After each group was done with writing thier page,w e put all the pages together and began to produce our writing using digital tools (W.K.6).