Are you looking for a fun and engaging way to encourage your preschoolers to write? Writing invitations can be a fantastic tool to spark creativity, build excitement, and foster a love of writing.
What are Writing Invitations?
Writing invitations are scenarios that give children a reason to write.
Writing Invitations can encourage using different types of writing, but the end goal is to provide a starting point that encourages children to express themselves through writing/drawing.
How do you use them?
Set Up a Writing Center: Create a designated space in your classroom with for the invitations. Writing Invitations are just that… ‘invitations’. Students don’t have to interact if they aren’t ready to engage in writing just yet. By placing the invitation at a writing center, children have the choice during free play to explore writing – without teacher expectations looming over them.
Introduce Writing Invitations: One way to up the interest in Writing Invitations is to take a couple of minutes to introduce it during group time. Show your students the invitation, tools and how it can be used. Explain that if they want to try it out, it will be in the writing center waiting for them.
Offer Variety: The great thing about writing invitations is that you can help children explore lots of different types of writing. From lists to maps and books to cards – invitations offer variety.
Provide Support: Encourage your students to use their own ideas and remember to encourage them to ‘write like a preschool’. This may mean they use scribbles, drawings, letter-like forms or letters in groupings to express their thoughts – this is perfect because it’s where they are at developmentally.
Celebrate Success: Share your students’ writing with the class and praise their efforts.
Example Writing Invitations:
BEAR’S BIRTHDAY
Who doesn’t love a birthday party?! To explore writing greeting cards, this writing invitation is to make a card for Bear and put it into his mailbox. As you can imagine, bear was quite popular!
SCHOOL TOOLS
This is the first writing invitation that we do. It helps children learn the different types of tools they can use to write with. There is a student directions page with pictures to help them see what to do. There are also labels for the writing tools that match the pictures on the recording sheet.
INSECTS BOOK
In this invitation, children were invited to create an accordion book about the bugs that they know. As you can see in the picture, this child used pictures to communicate her ideas about the bugs to include in her book.
Benefits and Expectations of Invites
BENEFITS:
- Encourages creativity: Writing invitations allow children to explore their imaginations and create unique writings.
- Builds confidence: As children become more comfortable with writing, their confidence will grow.
- Develops fine motor skills: Writing invitations provide opportunities to practice using writing tools and strengthen small motor muscles.
- Fosters a love of learning: When children are engaged in meaningful activities, they are more likely to develop a positive attitude towards learning.
EXPECTATIONS: When using Writing Invitations it’s important to keep your own expectations in check…
- The goal is to explore writing – NOT to get it ‘right’. Whatever children put on the paper is valuable because it reflects where they child is developmentally with writing.
- Don’t expect ‘real writing’. Preschoolers are in the Emergent Writing stage. They are exploring writing through scribbles, mark-making, letter-like forms, and maybe some conventional writing of small words.
- Making children go to the writing center to ‘do’ the invite can be counterproductive. We want children to feel ready and be excited about writing. This doesn’t happen just because they turn 4 or 5 – every child is different and we need to respect where they are in writing.
- Comparison is NOT the name of the game. Hanging up the writings of children promotes comparison with both children and parents. Every child is on their own writing path – no need to create a culture of comparison.
Where to Find Done-for-You Resources
I’ve created writing invitations so you don’t have to! We love using them in our classroom and have noticed more interest in writing for purpose – WIN!
