Colorful Writing

The fourth grade team of teachers in my building came up with brilliant writing strategies for their students to use that help them produce fabulous writing. It includes things such as figurative writing, onomatopoeia, effective dialogue, circling back, and synonyms. Seeing the writing that comes from these students having this checklist as their guide was so inspiring, I decided to come up with something for my students.

Since I teach Kindergarten, these expectations are a little TOO high at the moment for my kiddies, so I adapted colorful writing in a different way. Below you'll see the poster I created for K-2 students. 

In our classroom, we are mostly writing non-fiction (journal writing), and for some students it's a stretch just to get them to write a different sentence every day. I have found this poster to be a source of inspiration and motivation to MY students. I had to add more lines in their journal paper because they were writing so much more than they had been. Once they have completed their journal entry, they go back and underline the different parts of the writing in the appropriate color. Many students are going up to the poster making sure they use all of the colors. This gets their writing to be extremely detailed. "Don't just tell me you're playing soccer, tell me who you were with, where you were, when it happened, and how you felt."

The key to making this work is MODEL, MODEL, MODEL! Without modeling, you might as well not even use it. I show the students an example of how I can include all or most of these colors in one journal entry. After I modeled a few times with my own writing, we went through as a class with their writing. I went through every color and said "okay, with your red crayon, underline ALL of the capital letters." I did this for every color.

As most of you do, I have a wide range of abilities in my classroom. I purposely put capitalization and punctuation at the beginning of the poster. If they don't add details hopefully they are at least using a capital letter and a period. Also, I do not penalize for not underlining. The main purpose of this is so that the children are adding more to their writing.

Upstairs they underline for figurative language and onomatopoeias, but here we are just getting used to going back into our writing to add more.

I'd love to hear from anyone who tries this in their classroom and hear some great feedback!

*By the way, this was not introduced into my classroom until about March. It is up to you when you feel your class is ready to try this, but I strongly encourage you to try TRY TRY!