The Mitten Writing Activities for Kindergarten

Are you looking for a fun read aloud to share with your students this winter? One of my favorite books to read with kindergarteners during the winter months is “The Mitten” by Jan Brett. This fun story can inspire many different classroom learning activities, including writing! In this post, I’m going to share some of my favorite “The Mitten” writing activities for kindergarten.

The Benefits of Themed Writing Practice

One of my favorite ways to motivate students to practice writing is with themed writing activities. There are several reasons why it’s so helpful to incorporate writing practice into your thematic units, particularly units with themed read-alouds:

• Reinforce New Vocabulary: Thematic units often introduce new vocabulary to young kindergarten students. Writing with these new words can help them stick!
• Increase Motivation: Writing can be challenging for young students! By writing about a read-aloud they just enjoyed or a theme that they’ve been talking about in class, students are often more motivated to write.
• Improve Comprehension: When students can write about what they have read, they are more likely to understand and recall the story.

4 Writing Activities for The Mitten

If you aren’t familiar with “The Mitten” by Jan Brett, it is a beautifully illustrated retelling of a Ukrainian folktale. In this story, a young boy drops one of his brand-new mittens in the snow. As animals come across the mitten, they decide to climb in and get cozy! 

Each new critter that comes across the mitten is larger than the last. Students think it’s so funny to think of the mitten stretching to hold all of these forest animals! It’s fun to predict whether or not the mitten will be able to hold the next animal that wants to climb into the mitten.

After enjoying this engaging story as a class, you can use writing activities to help students practice fine motor skills, sentence formation, and comprehension! Here are some of my favorite writing activities to do with students after reading “The Mitten”.

1. Writing About Story Elements

This story elements book is a great way to reinforce the important parts of the story, including the characters, setting, cause and effect, and more!

As you read the story together, you could document these story elements on an anchor chart that students will be able to reference as they complete their writing activities.

Then, students can put together their story elements books! There are two pages that include writing practice. The first page is when students write three sentences to summarize the beginning, middle, and end of the story. They will write one sentence on each labeled mitten.

The second writing practice page gives students the chance to write a sentence about their favorite part of the story. Students can then create an illustration to go with their sentence. This is a great final page for the story elements book! Your students will be so excited to take home these books to share with their families.

2. Creative Writing

“The Mitten” can also inspire students to practice creative writing! After reading about all of the different forest animals that went into the mitten, students will be eager to think about an animal that THEY would like to see crawl into the mitten.

Once they’ve decided on an animal, students will fill out the sentence frame to name their animal and why they chose to crawl into the mitten. Once their sentence is complete, students can draw their animal in the space provided. The final step is to cut out and glue a mitten onto the paper to cover the animal. This makes a fun and interactive lift-the-flap display for the hallway or a classroom bulletin board!

3. Favorite Character Writing Activity

In addition to creative writing, students can also practice sharing their opinions through writing. In this writing activity, students will choose their favorite animal from “The Mitten”. They will attach a picture of this animal to the underside of the mitten cover. 

Then, students can write a sentence to describe the animal they chose and why. Explaining the “why” behind an opinion is an important part of this type of writing! This is a fun way for students to practice this skill. 

4. Text-to-Self Connection

An important part of reading comprehension is to make connections with the text. You can help students practice making connections with engaging writing activities! After discussing text-to-self connections together as a class, students can then think about a time that they lost something important to them and then found it. You could give students time to share their thoughts with a partner so they can hear how their sentence sounds by saying it out loud.

Once students are ready, they can write a sentence about what they lost and then another sentence about where they found it. This is a great way to help them connect with the main character from the story! By remembering what it felt like to find a lost object, they can better understand Nicki’s relief as he walked back home after his outing in the forest.

Kindergarten Thematic Unit for The Mitten

Would you like to incorporate some of these writing activities into your lesson plans? I can save you some time! I have put together a full thematic unit for “The Mitten” that includes all of the writing activities that I shared in this post. It also includes a variety of literacy and math activities that you can use to enhance your curriculum with engaging, hands-on skill practice.

If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this thematic unit, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or in my TPT store.

Save These The Mitten Writing Activities

Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite board of ideas for the kindergarten classroom. You’ll be able to quickly find these writing activities when you’re looking for ways to enhance your winter lesson plans.