Focus on writing

We have focused a lot on writing for the past month and a bit. We started wonderful writing every single day at period 2. The children have filled their folders with vivid pictures and some beautiful new sentences. Their folders were starting to get a little crowded so we decided to pull out all the finished January writing, and send it home. I made a cover page for them and evaluated all the writing so the parents can see what stage of writing their child is at.

Mrs. K discovered this neat idea on a kindergarten facebook page. Instead of the traditional calendar (that both of us were pretty bad at updating) we put together this bristol board calendar (thanks to our highschool student getting those volunteer hours!!! Didn't she do an AMAZING job!) The children wrote the word february to make the border of our calendar and then whenever they have something special coming up they can write it on our calendar. The children have contributed things like "Pizza Day", "Swimming", "Skating", birthdays etc. It makes them excited to write, eager to share and it personalizes our calendar into a much more meaningful classroom tool.

Last but not least for this focus on writing, we changed the way our children sign in in the morning. With our new focus on writing, we decided it was time to do away with the children finding their names on their paper and placing them in the basket. Now it was their turn to "sign in". So every morning they come into our classroom and find this waiting for them on the table with a bin of markers! That's right... Markers! How fun. They write their name on the lines to tell us they are here and ready to learn. They are having a lot of fun policing it and making sure their friends remember to sign in.