publishing teaching books

The children have practiced planning and writing teaching books using pictures, beginning sounds, and words. During the past two weeks they chose one teaching book to publish. To publish means to get your writing ready for an audience. They reread their writing and added final details. To prepare for publication we made a checklist. The children thought about the important things we've learned about teaching books. We used a student example to show each thing on our checklist and the children worked together to check their writing!

Using black pen and careful printing and drawing, the children rewrote their first draft. We talked about how we copy what we learned from our mistakes in the first draft. It's important we have cross outs in our first draft, but we don't have to copy those cross outs onto our second draft. This part of the process takes time. We talk about powerful work and ensuring an audience can read our writing. We want to empower students to provide their most careful work and often ask them, "Can you read your writing?"

Throughout this week children have rewritten the same page and we've looked at their work together. We want to feel proud of our work, because our work and our words are important. I often struggle with finding a balance when inviting Kindergarteners to publish writing. These are a final draft, the most information I get as a teacher is from the cross outs in their first draft, but there is value in preparing a piece for publication. This value can be seen in the silent cheers that erupt when a peer shares their front cover or when a child says, "I feel so happy and proud and my mom isn't even going to believe I wrote this!" 

One example of a student's persistence can be seen in the picture below. The student wrote the sentence on the right and I asked how they felt about their writing. They said the writing looked like a "blob of words". I reminded about finger spaces between words. We try not to use the words good, bad or best in the classroom, because those words don't give a clear next step. The clear next step for this student is to use a finger space. The student used finger spaces and worked slowly, writing the same sentence again. You can see their second sentence on the left. When looking at the two together, the student said that they felt proud of the sentence on the left, because they could read it. Legos are fun and this student should feel proud of their hard work!

The children will practice reading their final drafts to a friend one more time on Monday and we will record their reading on their devices. They will bring their final drafts home on Tuesday, ready to share the gift of writing (and information about one topic!) with their family.

Here is a small collection of front covers and a few pages. You can see how students use sound power to add beginning sounds for labels and to write words listening for the sounds they hear. You can also see where students found words in a book or in our classroom. For example, to write the word shapes we needed to find it in a math book. The long and challenging word different (difrnt) was written by listening for the sounds and writing a letter for each sound heard. This is using sound power as a writer!