Kid Writing

Way  back during the summer, Roaring Springs Paper Products had sent me a box of composition books for me to review.  At the time school was not in session, Roaring Springs has been very patient waiting for me to try these books out.

Roaring Springs sent me a box of marbled composition books for grade 1.  These books are filled with lined pages sized appropriately for children of grade 1 age.  When I got the books I was thinking of a thousand uses for them.

As I said before, our new Pre-K teacher is very big on teaching the children the written word.  When she was a kindergarten teacher she did a lot of Kid Writing with the children.  I have never done this before, so she is teaching me.

To do this we pick a topic, have the children draw a pictures, then "write a sentence" about their picture.  Our focus right now is to have the children writing from left to right, and to try to get them to form "words" together and put a space between them.  After the children "write their sentence" they dictate it to me and I write it also.

I have done the Kid Writing twice with my class.  Our first topic was our families, then I did a page about a pumpkin during pumpkin week.  During pumpkin I provided the children with the printed words to the beginning of our sentence.  They they told me what they wanted to write and I printed it on a sentence strip for them.  Some of them were able to copy the sentence, while some were still practicing getting down the writing motion.

We are using the composition books for this purpose.  The books lay open very nicely.  You know how sometimes it is hard to write to the middle of this type of book as they crease is there?  Well, we open the page, press down the middle, and the book lays nice and flat.

I have had the children use crayons and pen on the pages.  We have not used markers yet, so I'm not sure if the marker will bleed through the page, but we have had great success with what we have used so far.  We are even able to write on the back of the page we just drew on as the pictures "stay on their own side."

I am enjoying my new journey into Kid Writing and glad that we have a wonderful book for the children to keep their memories in.