Leader of the Day: 10 Steps to Strengthening Oral Language and Early Writing Skills

Last year, I had the pleasure (most days anyway) of teaching on-call in Greater Victoria School District while attending University of Victoria.  It was tough for the first month or two, but then I built up a collection of fantastic schools that I taught in regularly and I began to love the variety of classrooms, children, and assignments.  A favourite classroom of mine to teach in was Karen Higginbotham's Kindergarten/Grade 1 classroom at View Royal Elementary.  A day spent in Karen's classroom (and many of the others I taught in) provided wonderful professional learning and a wealth of fantastic ideas that I was itching to try out in my own classroom. This blog post is dedicated to one of my favourite activities from Karen's K/1 program and how I've adapted it to my Kindergarten practice at Oak Lake Community School: Leader of the Day.

Leader of the Day is a terrific ELA activity for helping children get to know their peers, so I decided to introduce it at the start of the year.  As well as strengthening the classroom community, this learning activity promotes oral language skills, numeracy skills, and early writing skills.  How did Leader of the Day look in Kindergarten at the start of the year?

1) Choose a leader of the day: our leader of the day was also our special helper (line leader, handing out papers, leading activities, etc) and was selected as part of morning calendar.  I like to use SMART Notebook's random word selector programmed with all the students' names to randomly choose a student.

2) Name recognition: the leader of the day printed their name on a special SMART Notebook slide and we named each letter. Using the magnetic letters tool in SMART Notebook, the student spelled their name a second time.

3) Developing questioning skills:  Little people have a difficult time telling the difference between a question and a comment, so this was our first challenge to overcome.  Once my students understood how to ask the leader of the day a question, we worked hard on formulating interesting questions rather than the standard favourite colour, favourite toy, and food.  I encouraged the students to ask questions with a numeracy focus, such as: how many people are in your family? How old are you?

4) Developing a concept map about the leader of the day:  the leader of the day sat at the front of the room and called on students to answer their questions.  As the we found out new facts about the leader of the day, I recorded this information in a concept map using SMART Notebook.  I tried to include a visual with each fact to assist students in "reading" the information later.

5) Paying attention to details: after the concept map was completed, the leader of the day stood up on one of my wooden stump chairs and we studied their physical appearance.  We talked about hair colour, eye colour, and the clothing the student was wearing.  I emphasized how important it was to observe the student closely so they could create an accurate picture.

6) Setting criteria: we created a list of what made a great picture.  Criteria included relevant body parts (such as head, neck, ears, arms. hands/fingers, legs, feet, etc) and using the correct colours.  We talked about how our pictures needed to be big (take up the page), bold (use at least three different colours), and beautiful (include many details).

7) Drawing the student:  we used a template to draw a picture of the leader of the day with a large space for the picture, with room for writing below.  Once the picture was completed, I encouraged students to print any relevant words, including the leader's name and their own name.


8) Editing as a group: once the pictures were finished, we came together as a group and looked at everyone's pictures.  Referring to our criteria, I modelled providing feedback to peers as I held up each picture.  I'd say things like, "Did you notice how Sam drew Gabe's eyes and coloured them the perfect shade of blue?" or "I noticed that Grayson doesn't have any fingers.  Next time, make sure you give Grayson five fingers on each hand."  After we reviewed all the pictures, I returned them to students and encouraged them to add or make changes.

Peer editing:  after a couple of weeks, students were familiar with how to give and receive feedback.  We started working in partners to give feedback to each other and make changes to our art work.  I shared the idea of "Two Stars and a Wish" (two things that your friend has done really well and one thing that they might add or change) and it worked beautifully.  I noticed huge growth in the students' art work and observation skills.

9) Portfolios:  once students were happy with their pictures of the leader of the day, we photographed them and uploaded them to their Seesaw accounts.  Parents were really responsive and commented frequently!

10) Book creation:  Each leader of the day received their own stapled booklet of all the drawings of them with the concept map as the cover sheet.  Students loved to look at all their friends' drawings of them and share with their families at home.  Pictures could also be photographed and included in a digital book, using a tool such as Book Creator.

This first cycle of leader of the day lasted about two months in our classroom, and during this time I noticed tremendous improvement in students' abilities to ask "good" questions, draw accurate and detailed pictures, print names and words, and provide and receive feedback.  Leader of the Day was an excellent activity for the start of the year, and I plan to revisit it for the last two months of Kindergarten--won't it be fun to compare the concept maps from the beginning and end of the year for each student?  This time, in addition to drawing pictures, we will focus more heavily on printing words and sentences about the leader of the day.  To give this activity a new twist, I'm considering using Skype to include leaders of the day who aren't in our building.  Wouldn't it be exciting for students to have the opportunity to ask questions to someone they admire and create a final product to share with them via technology?

In Karen Higginbotham's K/1 classroom, her Grade 1 students wrote paragraphs about the leader of the day and drew a picture as well.  Additionally, she included other adults in the school as leaders of the day, such as the principal and custodian.  The principal was the leader of the day when I was teaching, and it was such a wonderful way for the students to get to know him better.

Leader of the Day is a fun and simple activity that can be adapted to suit your students' age and learning needs.  If you decide to try it out, I'd love to hear how it went!