Weekly Journal Writing FREEBIE!

Weekly journal writing is a great way to explicitly teach writing skills in kindergarten. Use this free template to easily complete the writing assessment loop with your students.

This school year, I have some eager students that are already great writers. I want to get them to practice even more and also teach them how to edit their writing.

I put together this writing template to make setting up this center easy, and so that my students will get to know the routine of how to use it.

Read until the end of this post to grab this free download!

Journal Writing Template

When designing this template, I put lines for students to write on to guide their letter formations. I let them write whatever they would like to. I also encourage them to draw a small illustration to match their words.

Once they are done writing and drawing, there is a checklist to make sure they followed the appropriate steps (punctuation mark, lowercase letters, and finger spaces). They start by self-correcting their work, then I will give them feedback in the form of two stars (two things they did really well) and a wish (something to work on for next time). This way, they will be able to look back at their writing the next week to make sure they continue to improve.

Because I am always using the same page template with my students, they get used to being able to do these steps on their own. Writing, drawing, and editing their own work becomes easy for them, and they are able to transfer these skills to other activities that we do.

Writing in Kindergarten

I have written a few different blog posts about How I Get My Students Writing, and How I Use Small Groups in Kindergarten. If your students are not yet ready to use these writing pages, Knowing When to Slow Down gives you some advice for beginning writers. You can also check out My Kindergarten Writing Center to see how it is set up.

To make writing fun and exciting for my class, I love creating Class Books, and to see their progress through the year I always make Memory Books and Journals with them. Another fun writing activity is Finish the Story writing prompts.

There are so many fun ways to get your students excited about writing, and to engage them in writing activities all year!