Writing

Our crew loves to write. We have been writing books about things that have happened to us in our lives and other topics. We read lots of books about writing and they really inspired us to be writers. One of our favorite books about writing was:

We read this book and loved it.

We are learning so many things as we write:

• writers think about what they are going to write about all the time
• ideas are everywhere if you pay attention
• we have to write stories carefully so that our readers can understand them
• stories can be about small events in our lives
• we can use other author's books as a place to get writing ideas (mentor texts)
• we need to write neatly and carefully so people can read our great stories
• we need to leave spaces between our words to make our stories easier to read
• we need to use lowercase letters most of the time
• writing can be hard but we can do hard things
• we need to listen carefully to words to hear the sounds in them so we can spell them correctly (or at least better)

You can help at home by encouraging them to write notes and stories for you. They won't need much encouragement. You can also have them practice writing their numbers and letters, especially lowercase letters.

Below are some photos of our recent writing assessment. You will see a wide range of writing abilities. Our goal as writing teachers is to meet each child where they are and move them farther along the writing continuum as the schoo year progresses. The photos only show the first page of each child's story. The stories were several pages long.