The Teachable Method is a writing curriculum designed specifically for kindergarteners by kindergarten teachers. Using the Teachable Method, your students will be writing stories by the end of the year. Children this age love to write, and the Teachable Method will help them cull their skills as authors while providing a rich background in fine motor skills, phonics, and high frequency words. With just a few minutes out of your school day each day your students writing is guaranteed to improve.

The Teachable Method is a series of lessons that you can begin using within the first weeks of school, and continue using until the very last day. It makes writing fun and easy. The best part of the Teachable Method is that it requires very little preparation, yet still gets results. Let me start by first giving you a little background on how the Teachable Method came about.

When I started teaching kindergarten I knew that I had to teach my students to write, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. I searched through books and books about interactive writing, shared writing, the traits of writing, and so on. I never found a full curriculum outlined for teaching kindergarteners to write, and so many of the books weren’t designed specifically for kindergarten, instead they were designed for early learners, or primary grades, some of them even said K-2 on the front. Now, that is just crazy. There is not one teacher out there who thinks that a curriculum that works for second graders will work for kindergarten students! I turned to the internet, and while I found it to be a wealth of ideas and information, I still did not find a solid curriculum that would work for teaching kindergarten students how to write.

And so, the Teachable Method was born. I have designed a fool proof curriculum with fun and easy lessons to teach kindergarten students how to write so you don’t have to!

Once you have spent your first week of school teaching rules and procedures, most teachers are ready to move on to teaching curriculum. The problem with doing this in a kindergarten classroom is that your students are still so new to the idea of actually going to school and sitting in a classroom that it is hard to make this transition. So, remember that you need to start slow.

The best way to do this is with Table Top Center Activities or “Table Tops”. Table Tops give your students many opportunities to continue working on rules and procedures while beginning to learn to write.

Something so many of us forget is that at this young age, children still have not honed their fine motor skills, and with Table Tops they will learn to do just that. Table Tops will not be done every day for the rest of the year. You will probably only use them for the first six weeks of teaching, and in just a couple of weeks, they will be the lead in to more structured writing time. Table Top time should be limited to fifteen minutes each day.

In preparation, you are going to need five baskets. (I use 9×12x6 baskets because they hold paper well.) You need to label these baskets with a lion, a tiger, a bear, a zebra, and a monkey. I use these animals because even students who have not yet learned to recognize their alphabet, shapes, or colors have usually learned to recognize these animals. We have free center tags available by clicking here. These baskets aren’t going to change much over the next six weeks, but you will change out the activities in them once a week.

The baskets each have a specific theme designed to help children develop their fine motor skills, but are generic enough that students with highly developed motor skills can still learn from them. In the next few pages you will find a description of what each basket will contain.

Something that is vital to the success of this writing curriculum is keeping the children intrigued. In order to do this, you have to make sure you are changing out the centers each week. Even though the baskets will each contain the same basic items each week, they need to be new and fresh, or the students will get bored. If you are looking for center tags for your baskets, they are available for free here.

Each week you should take the time to go through the baskets and make sure they are clean and neat and ready for the next week. Pull out any broken crayons, or any old play-doh that has gotten stuck in them. In order for your kindergarten students to feel like they are doing something new each week, the baskets need to have a new ‘feel’ to them.

On the first day of each week you need to model the tabletop baskets for the students. You will show the entire class how to use the items in each basket, and most importantly, you need to show them what it looks like when it is clean. When you are finished modeling the baskets clean the basket up, and then show it to all the students saying something to the effect of, “This is what this basket looks like cleaned up.” It is very important to show the students what it looks like clean. If they are doing most of the cleaning, then as a teacher, you aren’t having to spend your precious free time cleaning up after them. When I first started using this curriculum I didn’t do this step, but just by showing them what a basket should look like when they are finished with it, I hardly ever had to clean up their messes!

Teachable Method has handouts available for each week and they can be purchased here.