How to books is our third in the series of writing units for our kindergarten students. In this blog post we will look at a few mini lessons you could teach, mentor texts you could use, and see what kindergarten students have done with their own writing.
As I said, this is our third unit of study in our writing program. These young learners have already had writing lessons on narrative writing at the beginning of the year. We have worked on a combination of drawing and writing simple sentences to convey meaning.
Since the whole class has been writing on a daily basis, they already see themselves as writers. So mini lesson plans will be centered around the writing process needed for procedural texts.
We have some anchor charts that will focus on mechanics such as how to write short sentences. Other anchor charts will be used to remind students of some of the self-help spelling strategies we use all year long. We use these strategies when a student comes to a word they do not know how to spell. For these simple words, they will listen for the letter sounds and put down the sounds they hear. If the kindergarten student needs help with sight words, then we will invite our young children to refer to the word wall or sound wall to help them. We refer to these spelling strategies for the entire year
Like most kindergarten teachers, I am a book collector. There are a few of my favorite picture books I like to use during our writing workshop time.
Books are a great way to hook kindergarten children and help them see how they can walk in the footsteps of some of their favorite authors. Mentor texts also give students the opportunity to hear new words, find sentence starters within each mentor text, and improve their oral language when you include a book discussion. You can also lift a sentence from the text to model what complete sentences look like.
As a side note: When using a mentor text for writing instruction, you will want to be sure you read the book to the whole group prior to your writer’s workshop time.
Perhaps you will want to read and discuss the book during your read aloud time so students have the opportunity to explore the meaning of the story first.
Then, when you are ready to use the book as part of your writing lesson, you will want to flip to the page you want to focus on.
As you know young students can not sit on the carpet for a long time while you read the book from cover to cover AND deliver the writing lesson.
What child does not like slime? This book is a perfect high-interest book that includes using simple materials and easy step-by-step instructions! That clarity of message is really helpful for writing how-to texts.
This book is hilarious. The illustrations are priceless! Your students will be able to use this book as a mentor text for caring for an animal.
This is another fun book for emergent writers that will model how to care for an animal. Even if it is a woolly mammoth!
There are few of these books in this series. I love how the author included “tips” for the reader to follow. That is something we want to ensure to include in our writing mini-lessons.
We included this book in the kindergarten writers workshop units that we published in 2011. It is a classic and a wonderful mentor text for how to writing.
In addition to being a great mentor text for how to writing, this books is also great for discussing the author’s voice or tone. The word choice is pretty spectaculary too!
How to Student Samples
Without further ado, here are a few how-to student writing samples from my kindergarten classroom. These are samples from early November.
This student example is from a little later in November. She was really focusing on “telling more.” I am proud of what she came up with.
I don’t concern myself too much with handwriting. We can focus on that during other parts of our instructional day. However, we do talk about making it neat so the reader can understand your message. I think she did a great job. We will get those capital letters out of the middle of her sentences with time. Right now, I just want to say, “Well! Done!”
Since I LOVE talking about writing, I have a few (dozen) blog posts about writing.
If you are looking for help with your writing instruction, Deanna Jump and I have created detailed writer’s workshop lessons. They will help you with day-to-day instruction for those just starting out or you can use them to supplement your own writing curriculum.flowdesk
We know you are busy and having one more thing to plan may feel overwhelming. Don’t worry… we’ve got you covered.
Our writing units are so easy to follow and will save you so much time. We have taken the guesswork out of planning with a lesson sequence that will take you from the first unit to the last.
These are written for primary grades by teachers with detailed, scripted grade level appropriate lesson plans at are quick and effective. We have multiple grade levels to meet your needs.
