By age 4 most children know the alphabet, but few can actually write it out. Children at this age, however bright they may be, are not yet ready to start writing and the muscles in small hands don't cooperate very well. Learning has to be made creative and fun. Kindergarten teachers can make alphabets on cardboard and cover them with colorful pictures, like A for apple. Use them to teach the child the alphabet. A magnetic blackboard with colored alphabets will hold a child's attention and help her learn the alphabet first before moving on to small words.
Children at age 5 have an innate sense of retelling various events that happen each day. Kindergarten teachers can harness this natural ability by encouraging students to keep a journal. Allocate a page a day and allow the child's creativity to flow, filling the page with a description of an event or a drawing to depict an event. The writing involves putting captions to the day's events and the drawings. Children should be allowed to write or draw whatever they feel best describes the day. Encouraging children to narrate daily events will help with comprehension and word usage.
Kindergarten teachers need to build up excitement in a child to learn to write. This can be done by getting students to make story boards. Using cardboard and old magazines, let the child select the pictures that best describe the story he wants to tell. Guide the making of the story board to resemble a cartoon strip. This will mean many small pictures, each of which will need a title. Writing the captions will interest and excite the child. Children at this age will face spelling difficulties; teachers can help by writing words on a scratch pad for the child to copy out.
"Invent a world" is game involving drawing and words that encourages kids to be creative and imaginative. Each child is given a plain white sheet of paper and a pencil and asked to draw her concept of a world. When the outline is complete, the child has to fill in the outline with features he believes the world contains. For example, it could be animals, birds, trees, rivers, mountains, volcanoes, lakes, seas and buildings. When the drawing is complete, the child has to label the different features that went into his make-believe world. The activity can be further extended to storytelling to encourage word usage.