Student Conferences
Taking time to meet with early writers is an important part of getting to know their abilities. When you meet with children individually, encourage them to tell you about their drawings and the words or markings they have written. An open-ended statement like “Tell me about your writing” usually gives the child an opportunity to share the ideas he or she is expressing. As you respond to your young writers, make positive comments about what they’ve done. Then teach something they are ready for, guide them to add details, or clarify something that they don’t understand. After conferencing with a number of students, you will probably find some common writing behaviors. Use this information to plan small-group instruction.
Early in the school year, and again at the end of the year, you may want to conduct an oral interview with each of your students to learn about their perceptions of writing. Use the “Writing Interview” for this activity. Keep the completed interviews in the children’s permanent writing folders or portfolios, and use the information to guide your interactions with the children as they write. The two interviews will show the students’ growth over the school year.
Writing Portfolios
More and more, teachers are using portfolios as an important part of their writing programs. A classroom portfolio is a representative sampling of a student’s writing for evaluation. It differs from the traditional writing folder that contains all of a student’s work.
In order to set up a portfolio system, help your students collect one writing sample a month or three samples per quarter and place them in a specific folder. During the selection process, ask the children to tell you why they are choosing a specific piece. Keep in mind that kindergartners’ writing samples will include a range of products—drawings, scribble writings, random letters, phonetic spellings, and conventional writing. (Photocopies of journal entries may also be included in the portfolio.) You may also want to include a student’s thoughts about their writing. For this purpose, “My Writing Portfolio” can be used on a quarterly basis or at the end of the year.
The portfolio can become a part of a child’s permanent record. It is an authentic expression of a child’s writing ability. Many teachers develop a checklist for portfolio assessment using the criteria or benchmarks provided by their school districts. You may also want to use the "Observational Guide for Emergent Writers" or the "Qualities of Writing Rubric." Be sure to share portfolios, or have the children share them, with the parents. Seeing their childrens’ growth as writers is encouraging and enlightening.