Talking, Drawing, Writing chapter two The drawing and writing book.

Chapter two is all about the drawing and writing book. It is full of lessons, much like chapter one was. In this chapter I was really impressed with the time taken to build up the drawing and writing book that the children will be using. I also found it interesting that the teacher had the students to build their work caddies. I use community supplies but I haven't ever had the children build the table caddies. I think this year I am going to do more of this in the first week. I had planned to have the children use travel soap dishes to hold their crayons....

I used these to hold my station crayons. A pack of 24 will fit...with no extra room. 

Tis year we are going to keep 11crayons in the box (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, brown, white, grey, and pink. Maybe a light blue too. I had planned on giving the sorting assignment to my student teacher but now I'm thinking that I will have the kids do it. 

Tis quote really stood out because it speaks to the importance for drawing out the introduction process of the drawing and writing book.  The rereading of stories is something that I struggled t teach last year. I almost think that I waited too long to introduce the idea. In the mindset of my students using drawing to tell a story then I should be teaching the idea to reread a story by looking at the pictures and deciding what is still needed. All of my kinders could have done this if I had modeled it for them. How wonderful is this going to be to teach rereading stories! Although I felt that I did a lot of teaching children to draw I see now that I did not do enough! We will be doing more this year. I am going t wait later to introduce labeling and writing words. I might even do it as a incidental type thing as I model writing, just to see who picks up that's kill naturally or wait to see who is already doing that with the people in their pictures.  Oh gosh am I excited about teaching writing this year!!!

This screams to me! It's what I've said over and over in PLC meetings. I think that there are two types of literacy teachers, those who believe that you read to write or the other track is you teach writing to learn to read. I'm the second. And this quote speaks to why I am that way. A child who can write, stretch sounds to put on a page and can read the words back is a child that can read books. There is very little that I need to do instruction wise. I believe that segmenting is a harder skill than blending. I am surprised by the words that my kinders tried to spell. Oh did they make me happy! 

On my here is a HUGE idea! Not only do words tell stories..so do pictures and voices! Thi is so powerful. Children start out seeing themselves as story tellers. They are valued members  of the literacy club because they too can tell stories! Then we start talking to them art putting those stories on paper so that others can "read" the story without them there to interpret the story.  Then at some point we are going to start adding words to these picture stories.

I want to make an anchor chart (that looks better than this quick sketch) that deals with the idea of rereading.  Maybe even include some procedure type things like have a neighbor read the story back to you. I'm still knocking around this idea.