Stretching Brains and Sentences in Kindergarten

When the kindergarten students returned from winter break they had so many wonderful tales to share about family traditions, places traveled, and adventures taken! The classroom was abuzz with excitement as the class reconnected and talked to one another throughout the day at morning meeting, during snack and lunch, and on the playground. It was clear that the moment was ripe to use these experiences to embark on a writing activity that could help to stretch some of our emerging kindergarten listening, speaking, and writing skills. Over the next few days, the students dove into a process that helped to "stretch" their brains by thinking about details of pictures, of spoken stories, and then finally written sentences to describe the focused experience.

First, the kindergartners thought of one experience and drew a picture to illustrate the chosen idea. The artists were reminded to think of several parts of their experience so that the pictures could paint and "tell" a vivid story:

What were they doing? Where were they? Were they with someone?

Why were they doing this activity?

After the pictures were drawn, each student paired up with a partner to share their picture and story. The listening partner then had an opportunity to ask questions to help the speaker add details to the spoken story, to gather more information, and to clarify their understanding of the  illustrated story. The partners were learning to add details to a small moment in time as they spoke to one another and some students even returned to the art table to add details to pictures as they remembered other parts of the experience!

After revising and stretching their original picture and oral story ideas, we talked in small groups about how expanding or stretching our ideas when we talk and when we draw was not only fun, it also helped to make the spoken stories and pictures more interesting for others. Everyone wanted to now know more about each others stories and we could understand more about what happened with all of the added details and information. 

 The idea of sentence stretching was introduced by identifying simple sentences such as, I played. The students worked to understand that we can add details to sentences just as we did with the pictures by asking and answering questions, such as: Where? When? How? Why? As a small group, we worked to expand the sentence in small steps.

• I played.
• I played outside.
• I played tag outside with my brother. 
• I played tag outside with my brother because he is fun to play with.

 As we practiced stretching simple sentences in small groups, a kindergartener made a connection to stretching words out when we kid write, saying "I get it! We stretch out the words and write everything we hear when we do kid writing. It's like that. When we stretch a sentence, we write down all the parts that we were talking about and make the sentence bigger too!"

Since the beginning of the year, the kindergartners have been learning what a sentence is, how to use capitalization at the beginning of a sentence, finger spacing between words, and the importance of punctuation.After this small group modeling and practice of stretching sentences, the kindergarten writers were ready to add another layer to their writing by adding important details. The kindergarten writers then returned to their illustrations to kid write their own "stretched" sentences, expanding writing skills, and deepening already present creative story telling abilities! Be sure to ask your kindergartner about the stretched stories they heard and the stretched sentences they wrote.