“...no matter what, let them write every day.

Writing Workshop: A Happy Place Where We Make Stuff
First, making stuff is developmentally appropriate. Children love to make stuff and to help us make stuff. They love projects. They love to make cookies, build forts, decorate Christmas ornaments, make up games.

In writing workshops with young children, we have learned to use this same energy to fuel the writing. We present it to them in just this way: writing workshop will be this time every morning when we get to make stuff, or more specifically, we get to make really cool books.

…know the supplies are everything, the supplies represent worlds of possibilities. Their eyes light up when they see the supplies. Get a couple of scented markers in there and some sticky notes and colored paper clips and they’ll be knocking each other over to get started! They love to make stuff, and we know this, so we use this energy for all it’s worth, all year long.

We know that developmentally, being able to choose activities from a range of options is very important for young children.

The key to believing in our students’ ability to do really big work in our writing workshops is to remember they will do it like five- and six- and seven-year-old.

Early in the year they watch videos of Eric Carle and Donald Crews and Mem Fox. They study book flaps and dedications and they always talk about who wrote and who illustrated any book they are reading.

Everything they notice about how books are made becomes something they might try when they make them.

They come to us in kindergarten representing a continuum between two extremes. On one end of the continuum are children who have obviously had very little experience with paper and writing tools. These children may not be quite sure how to hold the pencil or maker or even which end should connect with the paper, but they watch what the others around them do and figure it out and, somewhat awkwardly, they follow along when it’s time to write. For these children, it will be a while before they’ll have any words to reread in their writing. This is one extreme.

On the other extreme, we have children who come to us in kindergarten already writing a small repertoire of words and they have some tools to generate other words, meaning they already know some (or all) of the letters and the sounds they make. These children started “pretending” to write some time ago, and they had someone talking to them about writing along the way.

Source: About the Authors: Writing Workshop with Our Youngest Writers, by Katie Wood Ray. Heinemann, 2004. Portsmouth, NH. www.heinemann.com