About Me: Narratives in Kindergarten

Lesson Plan Template WCSD Writing Program Teacher’s name: Jodie Black Teacher’s school: Rollan Melton Elementary School

Writing Type/Genre: Text Types and Purposes: Narrative Lesson Title: About Me: Narratives in Kindergarten Standards-based Outcomes: Standard 3—Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.

Student Outcomes: At the end of this series of lessons, students will be able to draw, dictate or write a personal narrative describing a single event or several loosely linked events. Students will be able to read their narratives aloud to the class, partners or parents.

Audience and Purpose for Lesson: Kindergartners will be required to share all written work with their classmates in an Author’s Chair format. Kindergartners will be able to read written work to their parents at conferences, open house or at home. The purpose is to expose students to the narrative genre and build their independence both with writing as a physical task and narratives as a mental exercise. The long range goal is for children to be introduced to the format of this lesson and have good guided instruction while mastering the format. The students will then be able to persist with this format throughout the school year. As each piece of writing is produced using this format, the expectations can be raised for skills and technique the children will use.

Pre-requisite Skills/Background Knowledge: Students must have a solid knowledge of the letter/sound correspondences and be able to generate rudimentary text by employing these strategies: 1) Use a word wall, spelling list or other resources to access the spelling of frequently used words. 2) Independently sound out words using letter/sound knowledge to spell words necessary to drive the narrative. 3) Listen to and use lessons about concept of word and sentence to begin structuring simple sentences. The genre of writing described in this lesson is best tackled as part of a Writer’s Workshop environment in your classroom. Students should be able to make some choice about what to write and have an extended period of time to develop their ideas, go about the task of writing and have input and assistant from the teacher during the workshop time frame.

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Resources/Supplies Needed: The graphic organizers contained in this section will be helpful in organizing student writing. Pencils, crayons, markers or colored pencils can be used for illustrating text.

Mentor Text(s): Here is a list, by no means comprehensive, of some of my favorite read-alouds. But I am a “love the ones you’re with” believer. Many of the texts associated with other content area curriculum that we already have in our classrooms can work as excellent mentor texts. The school library and public library can supply the rest.

Teacher read-aloud has been shown to be one of the major motivators for children’s desire to read.

(Allington p.13) Heckedy Peg, Don and Audrey Wood, 1987 A Little Mouse, A Red Ripe Strawberry and a Big Hungry Bear, Don and Audrey Wood, 1984 Oh, Were They Ever Happy, Peter Spier, 1978 King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub, Don and Audrey Wood, 1985 Tops and Bottoms, Janet Stevens, 1995 The Farmer, Mark Ludy, 1999 A Cat and a Dog, Claire Masurel and Bob Kolar, 2001 Tough Boris, Mem Fox, 1994 Snow White, Randall Jarrell, 1972 Edward the Emu, Sheena Knowles, 1988 Rumpelstiltskin, Paul O. Zelinsky, 1986 Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McCloskey, 1941 Harriet, Deborah Inkpen, 1998 Sheep on a Ship, Nancy Shaw, 1989 Sheep in a Jeep, Nancy Shaw, 1986 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, William Steig, 1969 The Little Red Hen, Paul Galdone, 1973 Blueberries for Sal, Robert McCloskey, 1948

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The Mitten, Jan Brett, 1990 The Three Little Pigs, Gavin Bishop, 1989

Brief Overview of Lesson: In this unit, the children should move from writing what might have been a sentence, possibly during a journal writing time, to writing stories. These stories are in little books. Kindergartners write stories about themselves, their families and friends. They write stories about things that interest them, pets, computer games, food and activities. In this unit the full spectrum of Writer’s Workshop is utilized: Skills/Content Lessons, Writing, Publishing, Sharing.

Steps in Implementation: As a prerequisite, it would be advantageous if the children understood how and when to use a writing partner. I have written a brief description of how I use writing partners in kindergarten: Writing Partners: I don’t feel comfortable, as some books suggest, with putting kindergartners into ongoing writing partnerships. Kindergartner writing skills, levels, attention spans and personalities are changing so quickly. We need to get to know each other, all of each of us. I say, “Each day when you sit down for writing, the person sitting across from you is your special friend. When you ask them for help, they will help, when you ask them to stop and listen, they will listen. If they hear something you need to know, they will tell you.” I control these daily and temporary partnerships by putting the writing folders (or whatever you might be using) on the tables each day. I make sure cooperative and heterogeneous partnerships are created.

Partners assist each other in three basic ways: 1) Your partner can help you sound out words or help you spell common words. 2) Your partner will listen to you read whenever you ask them to. 3) Your partner can make suggestions to you for changes you might need to make. Set yourself up as a partner to one of the students while the other students look on. Role-play exactly the kind of language you expect the children to use in this endeavor. Kinders love to play teacher and will reenact your speech and tone uncannily accurately. I spend a lesson or two at the outset and a couple more spread throughout the year modeling the behaviors that partners should be displaying and the tasks that partners can assist with.

Lesson 1: Use the “Small Moments Planner” (This planner was adapted from the “Many Moments” planner that Lucy Calkins uses in “Units of Study” and is an attachment to this lesson.) The point of the planner is to introduce the children to the concept of a story. A story 3

has a beginning, middle and end. Begin by creating a transparency of the planner to use with the whole group on the overhead or active board. Do a think aloud, pointing to the sections of the planner as you tell the class about the story you are going to write. At this point you are just pointing and talking. Next, continue thinking aloud as you fill the sections with simple drawings that illustrate the beginning, middle and end of your story. I usually fill in the title at the end of the illustrating session, because it’s hard to think of a good title until you know what your story is about. On this day, only plan to do this lesson and then let the children begin creating their first planner.

Lesson 2: Begin this lesson by retelling your story aloud from your transparency. Let the children partner up quickly and tell their stories from their planners, even if the planner is incomplete. Then model how to transition from the planner to writing the story. When ready to begin writing, students get ONE Small Moments Writing Page (SMWP) and number it. Page one matches section one of the planner. Students write what they have practiced saying and, without much revision, recreate the illustration onto page one. When page one is complete, students help themselves to the next page. I find nothing works better for helping the children to manage where they are in the story and where they are going than working with just one page at a time. It doesn’t take long before books grow to many more than three pages and finally some children might dispense with the planner altogether. Each day as the children get out their writing materials and previous work, it is easy enough to line up SMWPs, reread them and continue where they have left off.

Lesson 3: Pretty soon some children will be completing their first little Small Moments storybook. I need to say a word here about publishing. For all the personal narratives we write, here’s how I handle publishing: When a child feels their story is complete, he read his whole story to himself and then to his table partner. Then he WAITS and makes his illustrations better. You do not want the children to raise their hands when they are done. This brings them and pretty much their whole table to a work halt and you don’t want that. The children must be independently working so that you can be circulating and helping. When I get to the author who is ready, the child reads his whole story to me. At this time I might suggest some revisions/corrections. Upon completing those, I would staple the child’s book together and the child would place the book on my stool for Author’s Chair. You may wish to devise some system for keeping track of who and how many books have been published. I just use a simple checklist and the children put an X by their names whenever they complete a book. This allows me to easily see who needs to hurry along because they are taking extraordinarily long to complete a work. (See attachment for steps described here.)

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Everything a child writes gets “published.” (Stapled, checked on the chart and read at Author’s Chair—simple and easy!) This is so important in kindergarten. There is really no reason to write unless an audience will hear it. Occasionally a book will get so far gone, so wrecked up or confusing the author will just decide to ditch it. That’s perfectly ok with me. In kindergarten, a child never copies this kind of story over. How discouraging! Kinders labor so hard over a story the first time—having to rewrite means only half the stories will be written. I believe in volume at this age.

Lesson 4: At the end of the writing session, or the end of the period, or the end of the day, or right after lunch, or whenever it fits in, all the children who have books on my stool will read them to the class. The author sits in a high-ish chair. I sit right next to her and a little lower to help with anything, so that the flow is not interrupted. At the end of the reading, the class makes comments or asks questions of the author. Author’s Chair is a veritable fount of teachable moments. Like when Andi wrote a whole book about her dog and never named the dog! Or when Lukas read his book and no one could hear a word! The children are amazingly adept at getting each other to attend to things I can’t always make them recognize. (See attachment for ideas for making student responses to authors more valuable.)

Lesson 5-as many as you need: Continue with think aloud writing at the outset of most writing sessions. Practice sounding out words, sounding out words, sounding out words!

Kindergartners need lesson after lesson in how to get their letter sound correspondences close enough for anyone to read. It’s especially important that the kindergartner be able to reread her own writing. Additional lessons can focus on many skills and rules of conventions. Seeing what and how your students are writing will suggest lessons to you and that is what should drive the order and content of lessons for your classroom.

In particular, if you do one or more lessons about writing complex sentences, you provide an easy way for your students to add reactions to their narratives. I controlled the construction of my students’ complex sentences at the very beginning by suggesting that my students use because, and, but or like to extend their sentences. Or they might just write more than one sentence on each page as a way to add details. See the samples below for examples of how complex sentences are reaction rich.

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A sentence that would have ended with only Angry birds is fun, is extended to Angry birds is fun because they are funny, after a lesson on writing complex sentences.

Two excellent complex sentences that allow for an indication of a reaction. I like skateboards because they are cool. I skateboard too, but I’m not as good as Tony Hawk.

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Revision Strategy: Revision in kindergarten is a delicate and tricky process. My 27 years of experience teaching primary children, 16 of those being in kindergarten, have taught me these rules for revision: 1. If a child gets so messed up that they can’t continue, throw it away and start over!

2. If a child doesn’t like what they’ve done, throw it away and start over!

3. Be realistic. Kindergartners are just learning to write. Revision is every new thing they do. Every new letter, every new sound, every new word, every new sentence, every new genre is new. Every time a student does something they have never done before, that’s revision. Kindergarten revision can be called envision!

4. Changes do not need to be made in a current piece of writing. An idea for how to make a piece better can be applied to a future work. This is revision for kindergartners.

5. Very often share completed work in class. Let the comments and suggestions of classmates be a subtle and effective pressure to revise in a future document. “That doesn’t make sense.” “What was the dog’s name?” “I can’t tell what your picture is showing.” These comments coming from classmates are powerful to kindergartners and will spur revisions.

6. There are no such things as “dead words” in kindergarten. “Said” cannot be dead when we don’t even know how to spell it yet. About the only word I ever suggest they use less is “then.” And even then only if they know how to use if before I limit it.

7. 3 Red Dots: Occasionally, when a student has made a similar error throughout a piece of writing, for example writing “hav” in several sentences, I use this trick: Using a skinny marker, I put a tiny red dot under each error. I tell the child how to fix the error and walk away while they fix it. If the errors are dissimilar, put no more than three dots!

They can’t remember what they were meant to fix when you add more items.

8. Gray It Out: When a child has erased and erased and the text is no longer legible, but the paper still has room to write on it or text that is satisfactory, I instruct the children to “gray out” the ugly part. Using a gray crayon, the student colors right over their errors, hiding them, but leaving room for the existing or more correct text without discarding the whole.

9. Do more than one lesson demonstrating how to make a text more interesting and informative by adding additional sentences. Students who are ready to hear this idea will and those who aren’t ready won’t.

10. Do more than one lesson about using conjunctions to make simple sentences complex.

Give your students a spelling list of these words for referencing and teach them how to reference it.

From Jodie Black, www.teacherjodieblack.com 2012

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Rubric:

Standard Emerging/ Narratives Developing

Approaching Meeting

Exceeding Student draws or (dictates or writes) a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provides a reaction to what happened.

Early books: 1-2.

(Sept.-Oct.)

Student drawing does not indicate a single event or a series of events.

Student drawing indicates a single event or series of events, but is an incomplete story.

Middle books: 2-6.

(Nov.-Jan.)

Student dictation does not indicate a single event or a series of events.

Student dictation indicates a single event or series of events, but is an incomplete story.

Late Books: 6-12 or more.

(Feb.-June)

Student does not write about a single event or a series of events.

Student writing indicates a single event or series of events, but is an incomplete story.

Student draws (or dictates or writes) a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, but is lacking a reaction to what happened.

Student dictates (or writes) a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, but is lacking a reaction to what happened.

Student writes a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, but is lacking a reaction to what happened.

Student dictates (or writes) a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provides a reaction to what happened.

Student writes a narrative of a single event or several loosely linked events, telling about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provides a reaction to what happened.

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Student Samples Planners: Below are several samples of the “Small Moments Planner.” Students will create a planner prior to writing their narratives. Students use the planner to tell their story in pictures and orally before writing.

“My friend and I went ice skating. We had hot chocolate. We skated together.”

“My grandma’s dog is named Boot. Boot died. Boot lived at my grandma’s house.”

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“On Valentine’s Day we went to the zoo. We saw a monkey. We saw a zebra.”

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Student Samples Narratives:

Annotation The writer of this piece meets the standard by narrating a set of loosely linked events, but is lacking a reaction. demonstrates command of some of the conventions of standard written English.

Sentences begin with capitals and end with periods. Some capitals are used incorrectly.

My Game Book by_______ Then me and my dad was playing the game. And I won the game.

Then we played the game again. Then my dad won.

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Annotation The writer of this piece meets the standard by narrating a single event in order, but is lacking a reaction demonstrates command of some of the conventions of standard written English.

Sentences begin with capitals and end with periods. Spacing of words is inconsistent.

My Bike Ride Book by _____ I went bike riding with my Dad. I went up a hill. I rode down the hill. And I fell down.

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Annotation The writer of this piece exceeds the standard by narrating a series of loosely linked events and providing some reaction. demonstrates command of some of the conventions of standard written English.

Some sentences are complex allowing for an indication of reaction. Spacing is accurate.

Some periods are used accurately.

My Book About Brooke by ____ My friend Brooke is nice because she is my best friend. Me and Brooke had a play date after school. We got home and me and Brooke ran up stairs and hid upstairs until my mom found us. Brooke had to go home and I went with her because my mom had to do homework. Me and Brooke set up a tent and we slept in it.

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Universal Access: The format expressed in these lessons, using a planner and referring to it while writing the narrative is particularly suited to Special Education and ELL students. Both of these populations can successfully utilize the additional step of bringing their ideas into a visible, writing-free layout on the planner prior to either dictating or drawing the words to match the ideas.

Connections/Extensions: This narrative format can be used for any other genre of writing. Just provide lessons for your students on how to apply this format to other writing tasks.

Additional Resources: NNWP.org Writingfix.com For further help with teaching beginning writers see: Jodie Black, Website: Start to Learn at www.teacherjodieblack.com. Click on Start to Write: Second Edition 2012 for downloadable text.

Credit: Allington, Richard L. 2006. What Really Matters for Struggling Readers: Designing ResearchBased Programs. Boston: Pearson.

Allington, Richard L. and Patricia M. Cunningham. 2007. Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write. Boston: Pearson.

Calkins, Lucy. 2003. UNITS OF STUDY FOR PRIMARY WRITING: A YEARLONG CURRICULUM: Conferring Handbook, Nuts and Bolts of Teaching Writing. New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Fletcher, Ralph and Joann Portalupi. 1998. Craft Lessons: Teaching Writing K-8. Maine: Stenhouse.

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When you feel you are finished with your book:

1. Read to your table partner.

2. Read to yourself.

3. WAIT—and make your pictures better.

4. Read to Teacher.

5. Teacher will staple your book and number it.

6. Mark your book on the chart with an X. 7. Put your book on the Author’s chair.

8. Start a new planner.

Author’s Chair Audience Responses I wonder…

I liked when…

I noticed that…

Next time you could…

This reminds me of when…

I was thinking that you could…

I wrote something similar when…

Your book is…

Your illustrations are…

Did you think of…

Why don’t you…

Because of you, I think I will…

Small Moments Planner By _____________________________

Title: First:

Next:

Adapted from Calkins’ “Many Moments” planner available on the Units of Study series DVD.

Last:

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Small Moments Writing Page

Small Moments Writing Page

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Small Moments Writing Page

Small Moments Writing Page

A Bigger Story Planner By ___________________________

Title: First:

Next:

Then:

Then:

Then:

Finally: