Writing Workshop Showing not Telling

An ongoing lesson in kindergarten is to tell how you are feeling and to try to get students to go beyond I was happy. It was fun. I went home. At this point in the year, I am trying to gets students to tell more details. We made a strong feelings chart last week and now we are working on what the feeling looks like and sounds like.  We played charades using our bodies and trying to guess the feeling. I love The Bad Mood! It is the perfect book to show feelings and have students make predictions about the ending.

 Quick Thought
I know Showing our feelings is a BIG idea for kindergarten. This lesson is planting the seed for what good writers do. I can see that during read aloud time students are quickly realizing when author's are showing us feelings.

This is the first chart we started at the beginning of the week. We revisited this chart often adding to it.

Next, I had the student work in small groups and focus on one feeling in the small group. The groups came back and reported to the class. They had to make the feeling face in the circle at the top. You can find this sheet download below. Group work below.

click here for the feelings sheets

Creating our class anchor chart 

 You can see below the finished chart. The feeling name squares are at the bottom of this post. I tried to change the font to go with the feeling. The students who made the illustrations did a great job adding voice to their illustration. I love how mad made their face red.

On a different day we worked on creating showing sentences below. We started with the sentences
 It was the first of school I felt happy.
I lost my mom I was sad.
I do a lot of crossing out and no erasing! Crossing out shows your thinking! I love the last sentence a child shared, It was the first day of school I thought It was going to be perfect until my mom left. I cried. This is an excellent example of what Voice sound like in kindergarten! The purpose of this lesson was to focus on  showing our feeling but we also worked on rereading our work, adding  missing words with a carat,  dialogue and what Voice sound like in a story. 

Showing Chart for Feelings