The letter provides an overview of the writing curriculum for kindergarten students. It explains that students will develop their writing skills from labeling pictures with letters to writing full sentences with spaces between words. The teachers will continue to teach letters, sounds, and spelling. Parents are asked to write down two things their child did over the weekend to help them remember experiences to draw and write about in class.

1. January, 2011
Dear Parent,
I hope this letter gives you an overview of the work we are doing in the area of
writing. Our emphasis in school will be on writing, itself. Your child’s writing will
change dramatically this year. At the start of the year, some children will pretend
to write. Soon they will start labeling their pictures with labels that contain a
letter or two. Once those labels become more complete, I will have children write
sentences under their pictures. A child’s first sentences will be hard to read
because they won’t yet have learned to leave white spaces between words, but like
everything else, that will change. The sentences will become easier to read as the
child leaves sentences between words, learns and uses a repertoire of familiar
words, and becomes more skilled with using phonemic awareness and phonics. We
will continue to teach letters, sounds, and the spelling of high-frequency words at
other times of the day as well as writing, and this instruction will help children
write stories that all of us can read.
As a way to help your child draw and write about his or her experiences, we are
please asking you to jot down on a piece of paper two things your child did over
the weekend. These don’t need to be out of the ordinary events. It will just help
your child remember what he or she did and therefore write about it. Please, send
the piece of paper inside your child’s folder every Monday.
Thank you,
The Kindergarten Teachers