Illustrations (People)

Throughout the school year I find it so important to reflect on my practices and read more about teaching writing to young leaners. There is quite a bit of information available and finding the most inspring, fun and developmentally appropriate way of teaching writing is a goal of mine each year. I try new things, look at each group of students through a new (open minded and optimistic) lens and collaboratively with my team try to make our writing lessons the best they can be.

This year my team and I decided to focus on oral storytelling first, as writer's workshop sessions and then focus on illustrations and finally "writing" within the first two months of school. (Although this would look different for each child).

This is the beginning of the graphic organizer we used to begin our storytelling workshops.

As you can see from my other blog posts, storytelling is a high priority in my lessons. Opportunities to develop language structures and vocabulary and also build on story craft orally helps childrensee their stories through, first orally, then visually through illustration, then by adding details through writing.  One of my first illustration lessons was called "What do details show us?" We looked at this through the lens of the people my student were drawing.

This student was carefully looking at details of his own face to show emotion and all body parts. 

I selected images of people from various forms of writing and drawing that had happened authentically in all 3 kindergarten classes. In small groups welooked at these drawings and asked ourselves, "What do the details tell us? Do we need to add more?" From our discussions we could see a ninja, a princess, happy people, people with no hair, missing body parts, color, stick legs and extra body parts. We asked ourselves, what should we (individually) do next to show more details in our people to help the reader understand more about our story.