11. Writing 5-Star Sentences in Kindergarten

Teaching sentence writing in kindergarten is much easier when students understand what a sentence is so they can learn the basic conventions and check their own work using a simple checklist.

In this episode, we talk about how to teach kindergarteners to write sentences with our 5-star sentences method.  You can teach beginning writers to independently write real sentences!

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Show Notes: https://kindergartentoolbox.com/episode-11-writing-5-star-sentences-in-kindergarten

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Today's episode is all about teaching kindergartners how to write sentences with some independence. Yes, they really can do it with the right supports in place. Welcome to the Kindergarten Toolbox Podcast. I'm your host, Amy Murray, here to help you simplify kindergarten with tools and strategies that actually work with real live five and six year olds. Let's dive into your shortcut to calmer days and more confident writers. Before we dig too far into things, if you missed episode 10, you're gonna want to listen to that before this episode. That one's all about teaching how to write a sentence in kindergarten, and that's really laying the groundwork for what is the purpose of writing, helping them to understand what a sentence is and everything that goes into that. Because until they understand what a sentence is, that it's a group of words that tells us something, that it has a naming part and a telling part, the rest of this conventions and all of that doesn't really matter. So go back and listen to that and then come listen to this, and we'll dig into writing five-star sentences that kids can do independently and they can self-check their work, which is critical when you've got 20 plus of them in your classroom. So in my classroom, after we covered what is a sentence and why are we writing and what is the purpose of all of this, we would dig into the conventions of writing. So we started with capitalization, then moved on to spacing, punctuation, spelling, and what that actually looks like in kindergarten, and do my words make sense? And these five components made up our five-star sentences. And the kids loved writing five-star sentences. It was super motivating and it was easy. I paired each of the five things with a visual so that they could see it, and I started to print the checklist at the top of every single writing that they did. And it was on a poster in our classroom and in their writing folder, so they had access to these five star sentences and what each step was every time they were writing. And then when they were finished writing, I would encourage them to go back and check their work using that checklist. And then they could color in a star for each of the components that they included. I even had a little star stamper that I would go around and mark their stars with when I was checking it, and then they could go back and fix it to earn the rest of their stars. For whatever reason, this star system really spoke to them and they really enjoyed earning the stars. And in order to earn them, they had to write a sentence with proper conventions. Now, we didn't just jump from here's the naming part, here's the telling part, here's all five components of a five-star sentence. That isn't gonna work. You need to slow it down and take it step by step. And you can find inside our how to write a sentence unit, which is included in the beginning writers bundle. So if you already have that, you already have all these steps. But you can see how we would take a couple of days and we would practice just on capitalization. And then we take a couple of days and we would practice spacing, and then punctuation, and we would go in those order so that kids could see what each step looked like. And then we would pair it with the visual from the checklist so that they could use these independently and transfer the skills to their independent writing. It really did work well when we did it step by step. If you jump in and try all five at once, it's going to overwhelm them and it's going to be too much too fast. Okay, that sounds fine, but what does this look like in practice? Okay, so when you start with capitalization, we did some sentences. I would have an anchor chart on the board that we displayed and we would fix if there were missing capital letters at the beginning of a sentence, if there was a missing capital letter for a name, or if there were random capital letters throughout words, because kindergartners are known to do that as well. And we just focus on getting the capitals right for a couple of days. And then we moved on to spacing because you need to make sure that they have spaces between their words so that they can understand that there's more than one word in their sentence and it's not just one long string of letters. That's a really important piece in being able to understand their words. So that is what came second for us. I will spare you my entire soapbox on spacer sticks, but I would just caution you when you teach spacing to remember that when your students are not in your classroom, they still need to be able to remember how to put spaces between their words. And that's why we always chose to teach finger spaces because their finger is always attached to them. So, yes, there are some kids who need more concrete and need something to move, and that's a whole different thing. But in general, we taught using finger spaces. And then after spacing, we taught about punctuation, and we started with periods, and then I also taught question marks and exclamation points. It's always fun to teach exclamation points because then they're like sprinkled in everywhere all of a sudden, which is super adorable to see. I'm sure you are thinking of kids who you have taught them punctuation, and then they have either put a period after every single word or at the end of every line that they write instead of at the end of a sentence. And this is why it's so important to teach them what a sentence is. It has a naming part and a telling part. That's the complete sentence, and now we know where to put our ending mark because that's the end of the naming and telling part, not just the end of a line or the end of their name or wherever else they want to put their punctuation. So that really does help to cut back on unnecessary punctuation, is reminding them. It comes after your naming and telling part. That's where it goes. After punctuation, we moved on to spelling. My role in kindergarten was if we've taught the spelling pattern, I want you to find it and try your best to use it. If it is a sight word or a heart word, whatever term you're using for those words, then I would like you to try your best to spell that correctly too. And otherwise, we are sounding out words as best we can using the phonic skills that we have. Spelling does not need to be perfect, but we want to try to encourage them to use the tools and the things that we have taught them. But I never wanted spelling to be a barrier for writing. Okay, we do not need to be perfect spellers in order to get our ideas on paper. We can go back and adult write later and work on those spelling patterns and things. But in kindergarten, we've got to be able to start to get, okay, I hear this sound. Hmm, what letter could represent that sound? Or what spelling pattern couldn't represent that sound and go from there? So that's how we handled spelling. And then finally, do my words make sense? Because the purpose of writing here is to tell someone something. So my words need to make sense. I can't have missing words, I can't have random things on my paper. I am writing to tell someone something. So that was our five star sentences. And like I said, we put this checklist at the top of all of their writing pages, at the top of their sentence starters, at the top of their writing journals. It was posted in the writing center. It was posted in a poster on the wall. It was in their writing folders. So they had access to our five-star sentence checklist, no matter where they were writing. And truly, it did help to build independent writers because they could self-check their work. Or if they didn't self-check, I could send them back and say, hey, go make sure you have a five-star sentence. And I saw less missing capital letters, less missing ending marks, and things like that because they were finally checking things themselves and taking pride in their five-star sentences. So where can you find our five-star sentence writing checklist? It is inside the kindergarten writing toolbox, along with all of the print and use writing resources that you need to build strong writers in your kindergarten classroom. So I'll make sure that link is down below. It's also in our beginning writing bundle if you are an owner of that. And it's in our website shop. So I will make sure those links are down there so you can grab them and start your five-star sentence writing journey as well. I can't wait to hear how it's going in your classroom. Until next time. Thanks for listening to the Kindergarten Toolbox. I'm Amy Murray and I'm so glad you're here. Be sure to check the show notes for all the links and resources from today's episode. For even more tips, tools, and support, head to teachingexceptionalkinders.com or connect with me on Instagram at Teaching Exceptional Kinders. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow along and subscribe to the show and take a minute to leave a review. It helps other kindergarten teachers to find us too. Teaching kindergarten is tough, but you're not alone. Here's to calmer days and more competent writers. You've got this.