Kindergarten Writers: Responding to Books

 Kindergarten students write for a variety of reasons. They write lists, letters, stories and they write in response to books as well. One example of writing in response to a book was when students in Raji's kindergarten class listened to the book Pinkie Leaves Home by Peter O'Donnell. In this book Pinkie loses most of his feathers due to his swimming in an oil slick. He finds that he is always cold. He decides to leave his home for warmer weather. During the course of his adventures, he finds himself missing his friends. Students loved how the author solved Pinkie's problem and found a fun way for Pinkie to rejoin his friends and to no longer be cold. After reading the book, students engaged in a picture walk of the story and envisioned the part of the story they wanted to remember. They shared this part of the story with their classmates. The next step was to draw a detailed picture of the part of the story they wanted to remember and then to write about that part. Students are using various strategies to write. They use words from the title to help them, sight words from their word wall and kid writing. When they use kid writing, they are applying phonetic strategies to their writing.