One of the biggest shocks for me in moving to Kindergarten this year is the fact that my itty bitty students are supposed to not only learn to produce quite sophisticated written works by the end of the year, complete with planning webs and rough drafts (the whole nine yards that I do not recall doing until I was at least in the second grade), but they are also supposed to use various technology to produce and publish their written pieces as well. They can't even type yet! Aaaaahhh!
Or so I thought at first.
Overhead projector to the rescue!
Turns out my kiddos love to do shared writing activities on the computer as long as they can "spy" on what each other writes. Rather than always using a big, ol' piece of blank chart paper to do our weekly interactive and shared writing activities, I now type the shared sentence and project it onto our whiteboard. Then, I have each student come up to type their own word or words into the sentence blank(s). For example, this coming week we will be focusing on the study of weather. The sentence frame will be "Today, I wish the weather was ________." The students can take turns typing in the weather option of their choice.
I recently expanded the idea to include writing emails for various purposes - thank you's, requests, etc... My classroom website has a blank email forum for my parents to use, but then I thought, why not have my students use it, too? They get a kick out of typing a shared letter to me or to other people in our building. Emails can zoom from our class to anyone in the building - custodians, cooks, other teachers, and even the principal! The kids absolutely love it when one of their email recipients sends a return message or mentions a note when they see my kids in the hall.
So, what I had originally dreaded and feared in the realm of Kindergarten, technology, and writing has ended up becoming one of the highlights of my week! Go figure.
Happy Wednesday!
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