Kindergarten How-To Writing- Brooke Rogers

Abstract

During the time of my internship I will be teaching within a kindergarten

classroom. I am at Gilbert Primary School within a classroom that has twenty students;

my class is almost half and half boys and girls. The school is title one and the majority of

my class is on free-reduced lunch. Therefore parent involvement is very minimal and

there is a lot of extra support needed for these students. Therefore I did my teacher work

sample on writing with a lot of individualized and group assistance within each of the

different lessons.

South Carolina State Standards Addressed

1.1 Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to state the topic and

communicate an opinion about it.

1.2 With guidance and support, plan, revise, and edit building on personal ideas and the

ideas of others to strengthen writing

2.1 Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose

informative/explanatory texts that name and supply information about the topic.

2.2 With guidance and support, plan, revise, and edit building on personal ideas and the

ideas of others to strengthen writing.

4.1 With guidance and support, use nouns.

4.2 With guidance and support, form regular plural nouns orally by adding /s/ or /es/. 4.3

With guidance and support, understand and use interrogatives.

4.4 With guidance and support, use verbs.

4.5 With guidance and support, use adjectives.

4.6 With guidance and support, use prepositional phrases.

4.7 With guidance and support, use conjunctions.

4.8 Produce and expand complete sentences.

5.1 Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I.

5.2 Recognize and name end punctuation.

5.3 Write letter(s) for familiar consonant and vowel sounds.

5.4 Spell simple words phonetically.

5.5 Consult print and multimedia resources to check and correct spellings.

Introduction

Currently within my internship, I am teaching a kindergarten class at Gilbert

Primary School, located in Gilbert, South Carolina. This school is placed within

Lexington One School District. The primary school has around 800 students that attend

from the ages of 4K- third grade. The town’s population is relatively small and the town’s

primary school, elementary school, middle school, and high school are all within walking

distances of one another. Therefore the climates at the school are very close and treat

their students as if they are family and genuinely care about the students. The school is

made up of 77.6% Caucasian, 11.9% Hispanic, and 7.0% African American and 52.2% of

the students at the school are on free/discounted lunch (Gilbert Primary).

Within my classroom, I have 20 students within my class and over half of them

are boys. I have 4 ELL students, 6 children who leave for math interventions, 6 students

who leave for language arts interventions, 7 children who leave for guidance

interventions, 4 children who leave for fine motor skills interventions and 5 children who

leave for speech. Most of these interventions time are back to back so that the students
who leave are in more than one of these interventions so that they are missing large parts

of the day. Therefore, we spend a lot of playing catch up during our intervention times,

that is split up between the teacher, the aid, and myself. I have a large classroom and

most of time is spent on the carpet with only some time to work at their desk, until we

spilt into groups for classroom time interventions. My teacher has 7 classroom habits that

the children follow and are reminded to follow throughout the day. When planning

instruction within my class my teacher really focuses on making sure children are paired

and placed in the correct groups so that they are around children the same level and

differentiate her lessons to fit their needs.

Methodology

During my time within this class I will be assessing my students ability to write a

how-to-book, using the Lucky Calkins How-to writing workshop book. I want my

students to be able to achieve the satisfaction of writing a how-to book. By the end of this

unit they should have written a how to book finished written following all of the steps

that were presented to them out of the Lucy Calkins Kindergarten How-to Book. My plan

for assessment is use the checklist on writing a How-to book to grade the students work

(checklist can be found within the references). The students all had a copy of this

checklist within their writing folders and could refer back to it as many times as they

wanted as we worked on this topic, therefore they also knew what needed to be within in

their writing and what I expected. Students completed the pre-writing on how-to-books

after the first session of Lucy, they were only given a brief overview of what a how-to is;

such as it is a book that explains how to do something really well, and were asked to

write one to their best ability. Then as a class we completed the nineteen mini lessons
found within the Lucy How-To book, we would start our writing time by using the charts

and examples of writing pieces, students who have a chance to see us as a classmate

several different types of How-to books and ask questions or brain storm with their

thinking partners. After the mini lessons, we would go into writing time and students

would form a circle on the floor and begin working. During this time as the teacher I

would walk around and conference with small groups or individual students. This also

allowed me to have a formative observation to make sure all my students were

understanding what was expected of them as well as what I needed to go back over and

make sure is clear. Students could be rerouted and made for the writing experience to run

more smoothly having the time to help the students look over their pieces so that we

could make them the best they could be from the beginning. As we were coming to an

end of the sessions we started talking about looking within our writing folders and find a

their writings that they love the most. We then started our editing process so that the

students could publish their writings. The published writing was then what I collected to

grade and compare to the first pre-writing assignment that the students had. This allowed

the students to pick a writing that they really loved and felt proud about to publish, which

allowed the students to be more confident when we came to share our books.

Findings

I have the results from the How-to books both the pre and post test. Students

knew that their writing had to be clear and that they needed to stay on topic and follow

the instructions of a how to book that was on the chart within the classroom so the

students knew if they did not do that then they did not get credit for this step. The scores

are listed out of eight because that was the number of things on their checklist.
 Pre-Test Results for the How-To Books

Students Results

Student One 4 out of 8

Student Two 2 out of 8

Student Three 4 out of 8

Student Four 3 out of 8

Student Five 3 out of 8

Student Six 4 out of 8

Student Seven 5 out of 8

Student Eight 4 out of 8

Student Nine 4 out of 8

Student Ten 4 out of 8

Student Eleven 2 out of 8

Student Twelve 3 out of 8

Student Thirteen 1 out of 8

Student Fourteen 4 out of 8

Student Fifth-teen 5 out of 8

Student Sixteen 3 out of 8

Student Seventeen 4 out of 8

Student Eight-teen 4 out of 8

Student Nineteen 3 out of 8

Student Twenty 4 out of 8

 Post-Test Results for the How-To Books

Students Results

Student One 7 out of 8

Student Two 7 out of 8

Student Three 8 out of 8

Student Four 6 out of 8

Student Five 8 out of 8

Student Six 8 out of 8

Student Seven 7 out of 8

Student Eight 7 out of 8

Student Nine 7 out of 8

Student Ten 8 out of 8

Student Eleven 6 out of 8

Student Twelve 3 out of 8

Student Thirteen 7 out of 8

Student Fourteen 5 out of 8

Student Fifth-teen 8 out of 8

Student Sixteen 7 out of 8

Student Seventeen 8 out of 8

Student Eight-teen 8 out of 8

Student Nineteen 7 out of 8

Student Twenty 7 out of 8

 Conclusion

In conclusion my findings told me that during the nineteen sessions that we did as

class all of my students had the ability to grow. Based on the results all of my students

were averaging getting 7 or 8 out of 8 on their results. There were a few students who

were still struggling but I feel like if they had been given a day or two more to edit and

work on their writings then they would have also received higher on their work. I also

know that those few students that did not score as high were also the students within my

class who sometimes get pulled during this time to work on their intervention groups in

other classrooms. Therefore it made it clear that these students did not get the same

amount of help or time to work on their pieces as some of the other students did. If I were

to do this differently then I would make sure that while these students were in the room

that I would make sure that they got more group or individual time so that they could

progress more. Overall, all of my students were able to see some form of progress made.

I believe that so many of my students were able to do so well within this because of the

fact that the way that Lucy Calkins sets up her workshops the students really learn the

process in easy to follow steps that also allows for a lot of assistance from the teacher.

The students enjoy the time that they get to work because its almost as if they are doing

this all on their own and feel accomplished when they are told awesome and that they are

now able to start a new book. So my conclusion is because of the way everything was set

up this allowed my students to achieve and meet the expectations that I set for my

students.
 Discussion

When I look back on this time of teaching my class how to write how to books I

feel like overall that my students were able to achieve the goals and expectations that I

laid out of them. I believe that the fact that my students were aware with how the writing

workshop process works really made this a smooth transition from narrative writing to

informational writing. I also think that because of the way that the Lucy Calkins

workshops are set up really promotes the growth of my students. They enjoyed the hook

of the beginning of the different lessons and were able to really connect it to their

writings, which made them engaged in the lesson. Then once we did interactive writings

together they took pride in the work that we made as a class and enjoyed getting to make

them together. I think that this was really helpful and allowed for a good visual on what

their books should look like. Another thing that I believe went well for my children is the

attention they received during the work time. I feel like a lot of my students really needed

this and I got to see a lot more growth because of this because I was able to make sure

they understood the concept and work on it right there with them. Looking back on this

though there are some things that I would change if I ever thought this unit again. The

first thing that I would change would be to get the students more involved within the

making the class how-to books, I feel like they got a good idea of what they needed in

their own for watching us make one together. But I feel like they would grasp the mini

lesson more if they actually came up the board to help me write the story instead of the

students telling me what to write. The second thing that I would change is during the

work time is have writing groups so that when I worked with the different students they

knew when I was going to be coming to work with them and it would allow me to know
that I worked with every student. I also like this because it would allow the students to

ask their thinking partners if they got stuck so that they would not need to come up to me

for everything. I feel like just going up to different students or sitting on the carpet and

letting them come to me did not allow me to reach all the students with the same

attention. And finally the last thing I would change would be that once the students are

ready to publish and they have edited their books, make sure that they write it over in a

brand new one. A lot of the time the students had a lot of eraser marks which did not

make it as neat as they needed, but since I did not require them to get a new one I did not

pay too much attention to that. Overall, I believe that this was a success and my students

meet the goal but I would change those few things.

References

“Gilbert Primary.” SchoolDigger,

www.schooldigger.com/go/SC/schools/0270000586/school.aspx.
How-To book, Lucy Calkins. Heinemann.

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