Student Writing in Kindergarten

I was doing my lesson plans tonight and I had to interact with this calendar of writing prompts from my school.  I get so irritated I want to spit every time I look at it.  First off, it’s just too broad of an age spread to combine K-2nd grade.  Note the current prompt for my kids:  

Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.

Never mind that our current science unit is FABRIC…….  My kids can hardly put the sentence together, “I like (insert something here)”   I would have to do a whole unit on solids, liquids and gases just to get to the point where we could put a sentence together.  THEY WANT TWO EXAMPLES OF EACH.  That is so ludicrous that it defies words.  I’ll  just shut up now……..

Writing Prompts

2009 – 2010

K – 2^nd Grade 

9/8/09 – 9/11/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
9/21/09 – 9/25/09	My favorite holiday is _______ because…
10/6/09 – 10/9/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
10/19/09 – 10/23/09	In a letter to the President, persuade him to change a law of your choice.
11/3/09 – 11/6/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
11/16/09 – 11/20/09	Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.
11/30/09 – 12/4/10	Think about what you like to do the most. Write a paper telling what you enjoy doing and at least three reasons why you like this activity so much.
12/14/10 – 12/18/10	Dear Santa Friendly Letter
1/11/10 – 1/14/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
1/25/10 – 1/29/10	Light is very important because…
2/8/10 – 2/12/10	Sometimes we give help, and sometimes we get help. Think about a time when you helped someone or when someone helped you. Tell a story about what happened.
2/22/10 – 2/26/10	Write a poem about your favorite food. Use all your 5 senses to describe your favorite food.
3/8/10 – 3/12/10	A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away lived a…
3/22/10 – 3/26/10	If you were given a free two-week dream vacation, where would you go and why?
4/12/10 – 4/16/10	Write about the butterfly life cycle.
4/26/10 – 4/30/10	Write a personal narrative about an event you enjoyed doing with family members or friends. Give details and tell what happened in time order.
5/10/10 – 5/14/10	Write about how plants grow.
5/24/10 – 5/28/10	Write about your favorite animal. Be sure to include descriptive details about your animal.
6/7/10 – 6/11/10	On a deserted island I’ll need…
6/21/10 – 6/25/10	Write a description about your favorite place. Use your five senses to help describe the place for the reader.
7/6/10 – 7/9/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
7/19/10 – 7/23/10	Write about what you’re looking forward to next year.

 

I could DO all that…. if I didn’t have an already full curriculum (which this of course isn’t alligned to).  Building the background knowledge for half of these would take most of my day. Many days.

Alphabet Books

There’s LOTS of alphabet books out there, and I do like collecting them.  What with teaching kindergarten and all……

Anyway, I bought this one awhile back.

The other day I pulled it out and we were reading it together.  Everything was going great until we got to this page:

And we had this dialog, “T is for Elephant……..Why?”  Thoughtful silence for a bit, then this one boy wildly raised his hand,  “Oh, I KNOW!”

“Yes, Johnny?”

“It’s for “HORNY!!!”

Choking I manage to sputter, “No the sound we are looking for is “T” as in, (turn the page) TRUMPET, elephants TRUMPET with their trunks and anyway, they are called tusks, not horns.”

Today was a Marvelous Day…… or something….

At my year round school we have 5 rotation groups, one being out on break at any given time.  A week and a half ago, they made staffing adjustments based on the annual “count day” and we lost three teachers at our school.  So they moved teachers and kids around to adjust everything and one of the things that did was mess up our preparation times this rotation segment.   I normally have my prep time from 1:25 to 2:15 every day.  But one day this rotation, they scheduled us in the morning during second hour.  And of course it would have to be Friday.  The first time, I forgot and was almost 15 minutes late.  Today, I remembered before school started and set an electronic timer to go off a few minutes before.  That went well.  But it really makes for a LOOONNNGGG afternoon.  And it’s Friday afternoon……..

Today went pretty good though.  I dumped the book we were supposed to read in Language Arts, (it was the THIRD of four times we are supposed to read it, and it isn’t good enough for four times.  Our unit theme works around the kitchen and cooking, and one of the books we have done is “Hold the Anchovies”, a pretty good book on pizza.  We’ve talked about recipes, where the ingredients come from, etc.  So I decided to read “The Little Red Hen” to them, and I made it a project.  I have puppets for the parts, I have a big book, I also brought in some wheat, still in it’s stalks.  We took a head or two of the wheat apart and I showed them how to get the kernels of wheat out and discard the chaff.  Then I had some bulk wheat that had already been cleaned and we ground some of it in a hand grinder.  I also brought in homemade bread, jelly and honey and they all got to eat a piece.  In the past I used to bring in bread machines and bake the bread right in the room, but I don’t have the bread machines anymore. 

For the last month or so, I’ve baked all of our bread.  I’ve decided that I like baking my bread in the oven,  instead of the bread machines. I have more control over how it comes out.   I can make whole wheat bread that is really a nice texture, not like the heavy stuff I remember from when I was a kid.

Anyway, the afternoon went pretty fast with the activities and we ended up with a surprise ending to the day when a mom showed up with cupcakes and juice for her daughters birthday (it was only a surprise because I had forgotten that she was doing it).

Dibels results

We finished doing the end of year DIBELS benchmark tests this week.  All 25 kids benchmarked for the end of the year except two.  One of them should be retained, he is very young and just hasn’t caught up, and the other has missed more than 30 days of school and has been to three schools this year.  Everybody else did very well though.  Even a couple of kids that are a bit shaky when compared to the rest of the class, still reached benchmark.  I remember that from last year.   So many of the kids are so far beyond the benchmarks, that the others don’t look so good in comparison.  When in reality, they have still reached the kindergarten benchmarks for the end of the year.

I’m just really proud of my kids this year so many of them can read so many words now.  They have just done an outstanding job learning.

Students and Schoolwide Writing Prompts

Our school has school-wide writing prompts that every student is supposed to respond to each week.  Sometimes it doesn’t work real well when the same writing prompt is intended for kindergarten through 5th grade.  Sometimes we modify a bit for our babies.  The prompt a few weeks ago was, ” If I had a million dollars I would…..”.  My kids think 20 bucks is a lot.  No concept of how much space there is between 20 and 1,000,000.  So I modified it to, “If I had lots of money I would…….”  then lots of money could be anything they thought was lots of money.

It usually works like this for us, (which bears NO resemblance to actual creative writing) I write the prompt in several places around the room and they copy it onto their paper.  In a few cases, I actually write the prompt on a small dry erase board that they can take to their seat.  I have some who can’t see well and need glasses, and I have some who can’t track print and copy from the board without a lot of mistakes.  Then they bring their paper to me or my aide and tell us how they want to complete the prompt.  We then write the last words on a small dry erase board and they take it back to their seats to finish and illustrate.

In normal writing, I would expect them to  use more phonetic spelling without all the help we give them with the dry erase boards.   Anyway all that to talk about one experience today with one little girl.

The prompt was, “My favorite birthday was when…….”.   Most of the kids chose to write about a gift that they received which they thought was especially nice ( although I can’t believe THAT many of them got a puppy for a birthday).  One little girl just sat there looking kind of sad.  I called her over and asked why she wasn’t finishing her paper.  I said, “Don’t you have something that you received as a birthday gift that you liked?”  She almost started to cry and said she’d never received a birthday present.  Since to my knowledge she isn’t Jehovah Witness, I felt really sad for her.   I gave her a quick hug, and then changed the focus a bit and said, “What about your fifth birthday?  I know you like school, you are my best reader (and she is).  Couldn’t you say something like, My best birthday was when I turned 5 and could start school?”  She thought about it for a minute, got a little smile on her face and nodded yes.  So that’s what she did.

Sometimes teaching in schools with a lot of poverty is tough.   I don’t know that I would trade up though.  Years ago, when my daughter was younger, she would spend time both at my school and at my wife’s school, which was a little more up scale (not a lot, but a little).  My daughter used to say that she liked the kids at my school better, they had more personality……   I would tell her, “Oh yeah, they’ve got THAT all right.”  But we knew what she meant.  One of my friends transferred from our Title One school to a significantly more middle class area and she used to complain about how the first grade kids at her new school were little Stepford kids, smart, but really not very original in their thinking, not very creative.

Trophies Reading, one of our stories, “Elmer”

In our Reading Program we have this book and the kids really liked it.  And most books we read several times, so the second time, as we looked at the story, I had the kids draw the elephants from the story, or one that could be in the story.

Since we are an indoor school, I created a “bulletin board” out in the hall outside our room using some of the pictures that they made.  I think they did a really great job on their pictures.

A Twenty…….

We have a weekly school wide writing prompt.  All classes are supposed to participate.  Naturally the product generated in Kindergarten will be somewhat different than that generated in 5th grade (one would hope).  For my kindergarten kids to do it, most of the basic prompt is copied directly from either the board, or a handout.  Each week, one sample is submitted from each class and posted on the walls in the school.  I would have selected this one, but this kid has been selected a couple of times recently, once just last week.  Last week the writing prompt was “If I were President, I would……..”  This same kid in one draft wrote.  “If I were President, I would lower taxes.”  His second sentence was, “If I were President, I would give more money to the schools.”   I wish I knew who he was listening to, and I wonder if they know he is listening that well……….

Anyway, this one just cracked me up, from the picture right down to the way he said his best present was “a twenty”.  Not $20.00, or twenty dollars, but “a twenty”.

Teaching and Assessments

In our district, we do a series of tests three times a year, at the beginning, the middle and again at the end.  These tests are supposed to be aligned with the state standards and the stated purpose of the tests is help drive instruction (whatever THAT is supposed to mean, I mean it SOUNDS nice, but reality has a funny way of poking its face into things….).  The district has these testing windows on the master calendar for different tests and you are supposed to give the appropriate tests sometime within the window.  The mid year window opened on February 4th.  It ends this Friday (as in tomorrow).  SOMEBODY decided to hold the tests until yesterday and give us three days to complete them.  Fine.

Yesterday before school, the AP got on the intercom and announced that she was opening the testing closet to check out tests, and when we got there, we were told to never-mind what we were previously told, we had yesterday and today to finish the tests, NOT THREE DAYS as previously explained.  Kinder and 1st Grade generously had until the end of the day today to turn ours in, after all, we needed a little extra time since we had to transfer all of the children’s scores to the scantrons since they marked their answers directly in the testing booklets, oh, and on the language arts part, grade them all on the different rubrics first so that they could be put on the scantron sheets.  2nd Grade and up were supposed to have them turned in by noon since the kids did their own scantron sheets.  I did NOTHING but test for the last two days, no language arts, no math, no social studies, no health, no small group interventions.  Instead, I tested 5-7 kids at a time while the rest of them did a mountain of worksheets (which at the end of the day today, I tossed in the trash on my way out the door).  Of course, now I’m two days off on my pacing calendars for Language Arts and Math…………  (oh yeah, they goofed up the math pacing calendar and didn’t align it correctly with the tests, so some of the material on the tests either hasn’t been covered yet, or was covered a LONG time ago, if we did the built-in-to-the – program  spiral review, that wouldn’t be so bad, but somebody decided we needed to skip around in the new math program and teach the material in a different order, so you can’t do the provided spiral review because frequently the spiral review covers stuff you haven’t taught yet………..)

Then there’s the actual tests.

I mean, who writes these things?  For example, on the Language Arts part of the test, there is a page with a pictograph (never mind that we haven’t done graphing yet, even in math and kindergarten kids always have trouble with graphs anyway).  One of the things they wanted the kids to do was to circle the title of the graph.  First, they can’t READ it, and second the title of the graph wasn’t the only part of the graph with words they couldn’t read, third,  the only context we have ever talked about titles has been with books, as in, “Where is the title of this book?”  “Where does it say who the author and illustrator are?”

On the math part, they were asking about ordinal numbers and they had pictures of objects in line and the kids were supposed to identify the first, second and third things in line.  But instead of just circling the objects, they had to find the corresponding object labelled a, b, c, and d below the picture and circle the answer there.  The answers below were not in the same order, and some of the kids were marking, the first, second or third answer  choice even though it didn’t match the corresponding location in the illustration.  Kindergarten kids are literal that way.

Maybe with all the budget cuts and difficult times ahead, they’ll put SOME people back in the classroom(not that that would necessarily be a good thing).  You know, the ones sitting at desks somewhere that think all this stuff up…………

Naw, that would make too much sense.

Reading First, Again……..

Since I got used to having people in my room while I’m teaching ALL of the time (well, that’s what it feels like anyway…)  I’ve actually started to enjoy part of it.  The on-site Reading First person has been spending some time with me and we have been working on some of the strategies that involve more of the class than things like just calling on one kid at a time for a response.  We used Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures at my last school, but a lot of the stuff they were focusing on at the time was hard to bring down to  the kindergarten level.  Three that are working with my kids as they get used to them are: Choral response, Action Response (like thumbs up or thumbs down) and Partner response (think, pair, share).  In Partner response you can do it different ways to engage both learners, A tells B,  B tells A,  A and B tell each other, and the beauty is that you can then ask A to tell you what B said.  If they don’t know whose response you are going to ask for, they both have to be ready.  The idea is to get many more kids engaged rather than just the one you call on.  Something else I’m doing better is picking up the pace.  On the phonemic awareness and phonics parts of the lesson, if they don’t know it, I just tell them and move on.  For example today they were having a hard time identifying the rhymes in some text.  Rather than spend a lot of time trying to get someone to give me the correct response,  I deliberately emphasized the rhyming words, then if they didn’t get it  quickly, I just told them and moved on.  I’m also doing more chorale response activities, like having them repeat the two rhyming words several times.

This isn’t a big deal in the sense that I’m giving them the answers, because all of the phonemic awareness stuff and phonics stuff spirals in our reading program.  Sooner or later they will get it.  I really noticed this last year towards the end of the year when we got into consonant blends, digraphs, double vowels, and silent e words.  At first, they weren’t getting a lot of it, but the more they did it, the more of them started to get it.  But they had to work with the things for a certain amount of time before it clicked.

Anyway, I decided that I’m going to video myself a number of times so that I can see what it looks like.  Oh joy.

A Fantastic Breakthrough to Watch

This one little girl did the most amazing thing this week.  She got phonemic awareness.  I mean, she got it.  I spent a half hour with her just a few weeks ago, and at the end of the half hour, she couldn’t tell me what sounds sun or moon started with.  She had a sort sheet and 12 pictures that either started with /s/ or /m/.  At the top of the page were Mm and a picture of a moon,  and Ss with a corresponding picture of a sun.  After a half hour, she still couldn’t isolate the m or s sounds on the sun and moon, let alone any of the 12 pictures she needed to sort.  Early this week she took a theme (unit) test in reading on our recent unit, and got one of the highest scores in class.  Lots of kids did, but she has been scoring so low on anything, that I was thinging it was a fluke.  But Thursday, she brought a sort sheet up that was for  the sounds for D and N.  She had some questions about the names for some of the pictures.  When I told her the name of the first picture, she correctly sorted the word to the correct letter.  I went through the whole group of pictures and the only ones she had trouble with were the two pictures that were R controlled D’s.  I have never actually SEEN a kid go from having NO phonemic awareness to having it, in such a short time.  It was SO cool…..

There are a lot of intangable rewards for teaching, but not always this dramatic.