 I'm a literacy coach at Humor Sir Elementary and I've been working with one of the kindergarten teachers going into her class for some writing lessons. What we've been working on is building the students' independence and doing self-assessment so the students are actually going back and checking their work to make sure that they are meeting their learning goals. Today, we are going to be talking about writing good sentences. And when we write our sentences, we need to make sure that our sentences are something that anybody can read, right? So we're going to make a checklist of things that we need in our sentence to make sure that everybody can read them. So we're going to start with what would you need at the beginning of your sentence? We started by making a checklist together. We came up with the success criteria together. What are the things that you would need in a sentence for other people to be able to write in? What goes at the beginning of the sentence? An uppercase letter. So you always search your sentence with an uppercase or a... Does anybody know another word for uppercase? Do you know? Capital letter. So the first thing we need is, can you guys read this with me? A capital letter at beginning. So at the beginning of our sentence, we're going to use a capital letter. There's something that we need in the middle of our sentence, in between our words. Turn and tell a partner first. So in the middle of our sentence, we need, let's read it together, spaces in between my words. Alright so we've got the beginning, we've got the middle, turn and tell your partner what you need at the end of your sentence. You could put a period, what else could you put? An exclamation point. What are all of those things called periods and exclamation marks and question marks? Do you know what they're called? Punctuation. Yeah, that's a big word. After we came up with the list together, we went over a writing sheet where they were going to write their own sentences and together we looked for the capital and the spaces and the punctuation to model the process before the students went back and worked on it individually. So we've used this paper before to write our sentences because it has this checklist that we're going to check our writing with at the bottom. So what's something we could write a sentence about? Anything we could come up with to write a sentence about? Maybe write about playing outside. Playing outside? What do you think? A picnic. A picnic. Bowling. Bowling. So my sentence is going to be, we… So with any process that you're going to start in your classroom, it takes a lot of modeling, especially at a young age. You have to model the process and think aloud what would you be doing in your own writing so the students can see that process and your metacognition and they start to take it on themselves. Outside. Who thinks that they can come circle the capital letter? Can you circle which one is capital in our sentence? Good. So that first letter, whatever the first letter is. This one's a W but it could be whatever first letter you have. And then for our next one, what did we say we needed in the middle? Fingerspaces. So we're going to make that part yellow right here. And what we're going to do is in between our words, we are going to color the space that we have yellow like that. In the past, a lot of times we would just tell the students, okay, these are the three things you need in your sentence. You need a capital, you need a space, you need punctuation. They would constantly bring it up to you and say, okay, I'm done. And they wouldn't have all of those things there. With the checklist, it makes them check it before they even attempt to bring it to me or ask for my help. So it's a lot more student driven and a lot more ownership on their part. So what do we need at the end of our sentence? So the last thing that we need. A period or other type of punctuation, right? So it could be a period, an exclamation point, or a question mark. And that's going to be red. Do you think you can come find the punctuation that goes at the end and circle it? Good. So now you guys are going to get a chance to do this on your own. You're going to write your own sentence and you're going to be checking it for three things. Also, it helps you become more clear what your expectations for them are. So you really have a clear idea of what they need to learn and how they're going to show you that they've mastered that skill. And I just saw you doing the yellow. What is the yellow for in our checklist? The finger spaces. The finger spaces in between your words. So a lot of people think that self-assessment can't be done in kindergarten classrooms, but really the students are ready for that. Good. And then look at our checklist. What was the first thing that you needed there? A capital letter. Good. And once you make the learning goals clear to them, they start to take ownership over it and they really can do a good job of monitoring their own work and seeing, did I actually meet that? Do I have all the components that I need to be successful? And that really puts the learning back on them and takes it off of the teacher. Instead of me telling them, you don't have a capital, you don't have spaces, once they're using the checklist, they're taking it on themselves and they're able to see if they're successful or not. Good job. So do you have all three things in your checklist? Awesome. So you can go ahead and start on your picture to match your sentence.