Educational Wikis - Kindergarten and First Grade

There is a wonderful resource created by teachers for teachers that I have been checking out recently. Chets Creek Elementary School in Jacksonville, FL, is using a wiki to share teaching ideas, assessments, educational links and more. This particular wiki is designed for first grade teachers, specifically those working at Chets Creek, to communicate with each other about what is working in their classrooms and to build continuity within the grade level. Teachers who are not a part of the Chets Creek community are not able to contribute, but can view and download content from the site. At the kindergarten wiki I have downloaded the kindergarten vocabulary "unit of study" (Part One, Part Two) to share with some teacher friends of mine. What a lot of work has gone into this resource! It could easily be adapted to fit other grade levels and is a great template for organizing the teaching of vocabulary.

Kindergarten Writing Resource

Occasionally I get e-mails from the National Writing Project that highlight what's going on concerning writing instruction in the United States. Most recently I followed one of its links to a book review of Teaching Writing in Kindergarten: A Structured Approach to Daily Writing That Helps Every Child Become a Confident, Capable Writer by Randee Bergen (available from Scholastic). Since I am interested in the teaching of writing to young children, I would be interested in knowing if you have used this text as a resource. It sounds like a step-by-step approach with some detailed lesson plans, which would be perfect for a first-year teacher, or perhaps even the veteran who desires to organize her writing "curriculum" in a more logical sequence. You can read the review here.

Retells in Kindergarten

The use of conversation is so important in students' writing development. Younger students especially benefit from talking about stories and ideas before actually writing them down. And because the physical act of writing is particularly demanding for these students, focused discussions can be considering a form of pre-writing.

We do a lot of retells in first grade as a way to teach sequencing (beginning, middle, end), plot development, and other elements of stories. Recently I found this post describing work in a kindergarten classroom around a retell. The book they read is called The Wolf's Chicken Stew by Keiko Kasza. My favorite part about this lesson is the use of felt characters to orally retell the story. Students can do the oral retell as part of their "choices" during the literacy block. What a wonderful idea! If you click here, you can see a video of one retelling using the felt materials.

As you can see, the teachers took the students through multiple readings and oral retells of the text on to focused mini-lessons and eventually writing down their own retells. The writing samples given show remarkable work for a kindergartener!

Note: If you wish to re-create this series of lessons in your classroom, keep in mind that these kindergarten teachers used their students' interest in this story to prompt the writing and retelling activities. You may have a more appropriate picture book in your classroom that your students gravitate to that would be more suited to these activities!