Publishing our first books!

This week was a big week for our kindergarten writers -- they published their first books! We have been working for at least a month on writing All About books, books with topics on which we are experts. For most kids, this is the first time they have been very deliberate about planning, illustrating, and writing a story. Many kids are developmentally ready to begin writing letters and sounds to approximate what they want their pages to say, but up to this point have only been using pictures to convey their thoughts. So it's very exciting to plan and write a whole book!

Here they are working in small groups to edit their final drafts. Stronger writers helped other classmates stretch out words and add labels to their pictures, while our ESL teacher and I helped.

Then they prepared their cover pages:

And displaying their books proudly:

As part of our celebration, we invited another kindergarten class to come listen to us read our books aloud, which was really exciting.

Here are our finished pieces, as well as one whole story called "All About Stars" by Kira so you can see a sample!

"I like stars."

"Stars are good for the earth."

"Stars are good for the universe."

I'm so proud of all our writers!