Sentence Starters

Help Students Begin to Write!

Sentence Starters invite students to reflect deeply upon themselves and the world around them.

The reproducible pages in these books consist of open-ended writing prompts for kindergarten and first grade writers.

Get Them Here

Sentence Starters invite students to reflect deeply upon themselves and the world around them.

Sentence starters give students the freedom to respond in their own unique and wonderful ways, both in writing and illustration.

The reproducible pages in these books consist of open-ended writing prompts for kindergarten and first grade writers.

What I Do

Here are a few videos about how I teach writing to my kindergartners.

Sentence Starters help

Sentence Starters charge students with thoughtful beginnings, upon which they build their own unique written creations.

Young students begin to read and write by learning the alphabet orally, usually by song, and then gradually learn to read and write the letters by knowing the correspondences between the sounds and their graphic representations. This process, of learning how to decode CVC words, along with recognizing the most frequent sight words are usually associated with reading, but they are equally important for writing.

For writing, students learn to sound out words sound by sound. This is called inventive spelling and is one of the earliest stages in writing acquisition. Gradually students come to write words as they are conventionally spelled, but for the kindergarten writer it is perfectly OKAY to simply write down the sounds heard when the words are spoken aloud. Indeed, if a child is able to capture in writing all of the sounds in most of the words he or she writes when in kindergarten, then it is practically guaranteed that that he or she will be a literate writer in the first grade.

Sentence Starters work

I use these prompts in my own classroom and I am consistently amazed year after year at both the quality and sheer variety of writing my students produce with them.

This is the power of Kindergarten Sentence Starters. They give students the freedom to express their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, knowledge, interests, and hopes without the somewhat arbitrary restraints of writing tasks that demand specific content criteria for the satisfactory completion of written assignments.

Sentence Starters prompts rich, insightful, thought-provoking, touching, perhaps even startling pieces of writing from young students, providing insight into their lives. The use of Kindergarten Sentence Starters results in excellent student writing.

Consider your students’ writing as art or illustrated poetry, as enduring expressive recordings of the lives your students live, that they can share with family and friends, as something to keep.