We are writers! (and illustrators)

This past week we launched our first Writers Workshop unit! We've been talking a lot about how pictures can tell a story, so we have read lots of books with funny pictures, such as Mo Willems' Pigeon series. The pictures in these books are hilarious and the kids really love them.

Next week, we will start writing our own stories, but we spent this week learning how to use drawings to represent our thinking. In Writers Workshop, we write our story drafts with pencil, so we practiced drawing with a pencil (instead of markers or crayons):

Then we experimented with different types of lines. We also practiced drawing faces with emotions, and labeling our pictures too. I just forgot to take pictures of these!

After we did each page in our Doodles & Drawings book, we put them on our table spots and did a "Gallery Walk," walking around the classroom so we could see each other's accomplishments.

Below are pictures of the kindergarteners doing their writing pre-assessment, in which I ask them to write a story on a page, but I don't give them any guidelines or help. I'll hold on to this and look back at it in a few weeks to see how far they've come as writers! Next week we will start writing "teaching" books, which are non-fiction books about something that the kids know a lot about.