Each day after lunch we have Writer's Workshop, which is a much anticipated time of day for many children.  It is often hard for children to stop when our time is up and if we skip writing I get a lot of disappointed feedback. 

As we have learned the letters and their associated sounds, children are becoming more and more independent as writers.   Writing skills naturally grow at varying rates, so we have talked about the importance of not comparing ourselves to classmates, but working hard wherever we are and continuing to show growth.  Some  children are still dependent on adults to help them generate sounds in words while others can write entire sentences independently (with phonetic spelling). 

Right now our biggest focus during writing time is getting words on paper. Children typically choose what to write about; many write about events in their lives, but other common topics include imaginative stories, books about animals, or books with a repeating or growing pattern, which give practice writing specific sight words (e.g., I see a flower, I see a flower and a sun).  In addition to writing words we also talk about starting at the top left of the page and working our way down and leaving spaces between words, which makes a piece of writing much easier to read.

I have compared writing to climbing a mountain, an analogy children seem to like.  As long as one takes even the tiniest steps they will continue to move up the mountain.   Children are very eager to share their finished work with the class and they are so excited when I can read what they have written without any help (I have lots of practice with this - don't worry if you can't quite read your child's writing yet!)