How do you start off the year teaching writing in Kindergarten? More than likely, your students will not be ready to be writing full sentences yet. You will have to really start from the basics of writing, with lots of modeling and scaffolding to get them where they need to be. Here are four Kindergarten beginning writing skills you need to focus on before your students can write independently.
Four Kindergarten Beginning Writing Skills
Name Writing
The first Kindergarten beginning writing skill you want your students to master is writing their first and last name. Many of your students will come in with a little background knowledge of how to write their name. Some will be able to write it independently, using upper- and lowercase letters properly, while others may just be writing in all uppercase letters, and others will need help forming the specific letters still. On the first day of school, I have all my students “sign in” on a big piece of anchor chart paper. This gives me a quick assessment to where my students are at. Another first-day activity is this coloring page with a spot to write their name at the bottom.
I make a quick note of where all my students are to see how much time I will have to spend working on this skill. Usually, we do a few name-writing activities throughout the first 2 weeks of school and that's about it! You can find more ideas to practice name-writing here.
Fine Motor Skills
Every year, I noticed that my students starting Kindergarten lacked fine motor strength. And each year, teaching writing became even harder, because they had poor fine motor skills. One writing skill that I really focus on at the start of Kindergarten is strengthening those fine motor skills! One way your students can practice fine motor skills and start handwriting practice is through these Fine Motor Alphabet and Handwriting Practice Worksheets. I created these to solve the biggest problem with beginning-of-the-year writing: building fine motor skills while working on handwriting. Your students will practice fine motor skills with hands-on ways, such as paper tearing, using hole punchers, cut and paste, and more.
You can use one per day to practice each letter of the alphabet and hit on all the skills mentioned here in this blog post!
Drawing to Match Writing
If you've taught Kindergarten before, I'm sure you've heard “But I don't know how to draw that.” from your students. Seeing the full picture of something is hard for young kids to break down and draw piece by piece. That's where directed drawing comes in! Rather than teaching our students how to draw by just looking at a picture, this strategy breaks down a picture into easy-to-draw shapes. First, I would make sure your students know how to draw the main shapes, like circles, squares, triangles, etc. Then, you can start teaching them how to use those shapes to draw actual pictures! One way you can do this is through these Directed Drawing Daily Writing Journals, made just for Kindergarten!
Read more about how I use the Daily Writing Journals with Directed Drawings to help students learn how to draw and write properly.
Handwriting
Perhaps the most important writing skill for the start of Kindergarten is handwriting. You will need to teach your students explicitly how to write each letter. Tracing letters and trying on their own is just not enough. Plus, you will need to be teaching handwriting all year long, not just at the beginning of the year. I really feel strongly that developing proper handwriting techniques with your students will help them become confident, independent writers!
I have a blog post that walks you through exactly how to teach handwriting and some of my favorite activities to try here: How to Teach Handwriting in Kindergarten.
Once your students have some practice with these four Kindergarten beginning writing skills, they will be much more prepared to start writing independently! If you want to learn more about the next step to building independent writers, check out this blog post here for your next step: How to Model Sentence Writing
