Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes. Contains 792 words.
Target Audience: Classroom Teachers
The Context
My pre-kindergarten classroom is a linguistically rich environment. At almost every turn, children are saying the most interesting things! They have conversations about what games to play at recess, share about themselves or their families during meetings, tell stories about babies, trains, castles, and more in dramatic play or blocks, and solve problems together in the peace corner. Oh, to be a fly on the wall as children engage with one another all day long!
I relish the unselfconscious ways that four-year-olds put language together. Their words typically flow to my ear like spoken word poetry. Comprehending everything they say can feel tricky to my logical adult brain. I want them to know how to say things “correctly,” but I also deeply value and honor who they are now. By transcribing what children say and how they say it, I aim to validate how they communicate and express themselves, mistakes and all.
Behind the Scenes
While I cannot preserve my students’ spoken words each and every day, I take time at least once a week to transcribe them when they write in their journals. For me, it is an opportunity to listen carefully one-on-one as a child speaks freely about their drawing, tells me a story, or shares anything else they want. Inevitably there will always be some aspect of the transcription that is slightly changed by me or is subject to my interpretation, but my intent is always to capture each child’s words as accurately as possible.
Examples in Action
I hope you enjoy the following recent journal transcriptions from students in my pre-kindergarten classroom, all of whom are four years old. You can see a wide range of literary styles, topics, vocabulary choices, and genres demonstrated in these examples. They were each accompanied by drawings but I am not including those here.
“One day I lost my bag with my nanny in the subway. We were on the wrong side of my bag. And then I saw a teeny bit of my bag but I didn’t tell my nanny because I wanted her to keep looking for it. And finally she said, “We are on the wrong side of my bag!”
By: E.M.
“A traffic light. Water bottle.”
By: Y.C.
“This is my dress. And this is my home with so many neighbors. And this is a little house called Brooklyn. And daddy always goes to Brooklyn. This is my mom.”
By: A.T.
“We’re headed to the jungle to see the zig zag elephants. But we can’t go there if we don’t take a moon car and there’s something special that’s in the moon car. The thing that’s in the moon car is a rope. But watch out for the zig zag snakes because they have zig zag tongues that can spike you and control you all day long you can’t even stop.”
By: J.J.R.-Y.
“When I told my mom I wanted to go to my friend’s house she said, “Ok, tomorrow morning.” And then I told my mom I wanted to also go to Central Park with my dad, and he said, “Yes.”
By: M.W.
“My daddy, my mommy, and me is sleep. And my daddy and my mommy say goodnight.”
By: A.T.
“One day there was a big giant storm but then there was a superhero that saved the storm because the storm was going in circles. He was about to throw up. But the superhero didn’t let him do that because the superhero was a good guy but he was pretending to be a good guy but he was actually a bad guy. And then one day a mommy came up but then there was a big alligator which actually ate the mommy. But then there was a big storm again but the alligators didn’t even know the storm was a rainbow and then the alligator didn’t even notice the rainbow was filled with sparkles.”
By: A.S.
“This is a map. The car is over here. These are all the floaties.”
By: T.K.
“Once upon a time there was an animal officer truck and he catched a sloth and he used a hammer and he banged it and he saw a hedgehog and he catched it. And then a lot of caterpillars came out and then the truck drived away and never ever came back. Then a blustery storm came and said, “What are you talking about?” And then a truck came that said, “What are you talking about?” And then the sun popped up and went up and down and up and down. And then a kittycat came and said, “I can hear you yelling!” And then another sloth came and threw himself in the leaves.”
By: L.M.
One Final Thing
Thank you for taking time to read the work of my young students. I truly enjoy sharing it with you and the larger Two Writing Teachers blog community!
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I loved reading what your students wrote, Jenna. Some of their phrasing is precious and captures who they are that this moment.
“These are all the floaties.” 🙂
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