It's time to plan out your weekly writing lessons for Kindergarten, but where do you start? Planning your weekly writing lessons doesn't need to be complicated or super detailed. I just use a few simple go-to writing lessons that my students love. Today on the blog, I am sharing how I plan my weekly writing lessons from start to finish, along with my go-to writing activities.
Create a Writing Plan
Before the school year starts, it is important to have a plan in place. Whether you have a Guided Writing curriculum, use your Reading Curriculum suggestions to write your lessons, or create your own writing lessons, you need to have a plan in place. I always create my own curriculum maps for each month and input the skills and lesson numbers for all subjects. This helps me stay focused on what my students need to learn and where they need to be academically at the end of the year. Here's a look at my suggested Kindergarten writing skills progression.
You can grab these Editable Monthly Planning Pages to help plan your year out here.
Designate a Set Writing Time
Depending on your school, you may have a set schedule or you may be on your own to create your own. Here's what my sample daily Kindergarten schedule looked like. No matter your situation, you should set aside 15-30 minutes per day for a whole group writing lesson. I always had a writing center station, as well as once a week of small group writing instruction. There were times that I would push writing aside and I could tell it was affecting my students. Having your students write every day is just as important as reading or math! Make sure you set your time and stick to it!
Planning your weekly writing lessons for Kindergarten
When planning my weekly lessons, I kept it very simple and did the same type of lesson every day, but changed it from week to week. Here's what a sample week looked like:
Monday: Handwriting Practice
At the start of the week, we would practice handwriting. Now, at the very beginning of the year, we did handwriting more than just once a week, while we were doing our Letter Recognition and Sounds unit. We practiced handwriting daily, and then I modeled writing a sentence with a word that started with that letter sound. However, starting Week 6, we started doing more writing and less handwriting. Monday's writing lesson would be a letter (I used our reading curriculum letter of the week). Since my students already knew how to write it, I would look for improved penmanship. We wrote the uppercase letter across the top line, then the lowercase letter on the second line. On the third line, we wrote a few words that started with that letter, then on the last line, we came up with a sentence and wrote that. Here's the free horizontal writing paper I used.
Tuesday & Wednesday: Guided Writing Lesson
For the next two (sometimes three) days, I taught a whole group writing lesson. I modeled the writing skill of the week and helped them as they practiced it.
Here's a few guided writing lessons I might teach throughout the year:
- Sentence Building- here's how I taught Sentence Building as a whole group activity
- Phonics Writing- practice blending a word, then using that word in a sentence
- How To Writing
- Sentence stems
- Character and Setting
- First, Next, Then, and Last
- Reading Comprehension- responding to a question from a story
- Writing about a Topic- I liked using these picture prompts to help my students brainstorm
Thursday: Independent Writing
On Thursdays, we always did an independent writing prompt. This typically tied in whatever science, social studies, or character trait we were learning for the week. The writing skill was usually was whatever writing they had practiced during the whole group lesson the two days before. At the beginning of the year, it was mainly handwriting and simple sentences (using sentence stems). As the year went on, students were able to become more independent writers. Here's how I used picture prompts to help build independent writing.
Friday: Creative Writing
On Friday, we would either finish our independent writing from Thursday or do a writing craftivity like the one below.
To get a better understanding, I've included a week's worth of lesson plans based on learning about the seasons of the year. Just add in your email below and it will get sent right to your email.
I hope this post helps when you are planning your weekly writing lessons for Kindergarten!
