These January writing prompts for kindergarten, first grade, and second grade are thematic mini-lessons and can be used with common January themes taught in K-2 classrooms.

With each lesson, I suggest a picture book and a kid-friendly video for each topic, but these are designed to be used with any book you can find about the topic! Many of the lessons don’t even require a book and you could simply have a conversation with kids first about the topic (but I find a book or video helps make things more memorable and gives students more to write about).

With each lesson, I also include differentiated writing pages so these can be used with kindergarten, first, and second-grade students. Your Kindergarten students may end up relying heavily on a picture box and the traceable sentence stems. Your 1st-grade students may use the word banks to generate their own complete sentences. Your 2nd-grade students may write their own paragraph (or 2-3 sentences) about the topic at hand. These are just some baseline ideas and since our students span a varying range of skillsets, you can use more than one of the pages within your own classroom to meet the needs of your students!

The January mini-lessons are:

1. Penguin Facts
2. My New Year’s Resolution
3. I can persevere
4. How to build a snowman
5. Grizzly vs. Polar Bears
6. Winter Opinions
7. All about popcorn (1/19)

Enjoy!

Susan