After the Holiday

Have you ever noticed with kindergartners that when they come back from the winter holidays, they seem to have grown?! It's only a two week break but when they come back they seem to have assimilated much of the teaching that you did before the break. When they left, you wondered if they were really getting it, and then you come back and realize that, "Yes! They are getting it!" It is what I call the "magic pixie dust" that gets sprinkled over the holiday!!

As we came back to Chets Creek our Kindergarten Pacing Guide said that we should be working on Reading Strategies in Readers' Workshop and on Response to Literature in Writers' Workshop. Our teachers quickly realized that Reading Strategies (such as "looking at the pictures," "getting your mouth ready," "skip and return") are exactly where we should be in Readers' Workshop, but in Writers' we really needed to revisit Narrative. So-o-o-o when you walk into classrooms, what do you see right now?

In Writers' Workshop, teachers are having students make decisions and cleaning out their work-in-progress folders. "Can you read this? If you can, you should keep it, but if you can't you should get rid of it." The children end up with a few pieces that they can read back to themselves to begin to revise (by adding to it), and to edit (for capitals, punctuation and spelling of words that can be found around the room).