I've been doing autobiographies in my classroom for a long time. Kids love to write about themselves and this is a fun way to get it rolling. It's the road to Writingville!
Start with a clipart automobile. I have my complete idea at
TPT. Create pages for name, age, favorites, family, what I want to be when I grow up, etc. Make a car for each child. They fill it in, cut it out, and attach it to your bulletin board road.
Take large black construction paper and cut it in half. Use white or yellow chalk to draw dotted lines down the center for road lines. Make street signs like...
Tell them that writing letters or words without spaces causes traffic jams in our city. Injured letters or words must take an ambulance ride to the Helping Hospital.
Your city can include places like "Punctuation Point, Comma Curve, Capital Letter City Hall, Grammar Gardens, Letter Lake," etc. Put up road construction signs that say, "Sentence Construction Ahead - Please Write Slowly & Carefully."
Another way to really celebrate this concept is to have a grade level Indianapolis-like 500 race. We call ours the Kindy 500. The children make cardboard cars with the help of their families. We turn our parking lot into a make believe race track using flags purchased from Oriental Trading. We race walk the AUTOS four at a time and everyone gets a ribbon. We have gasoline alley for photos, parents bring in real race cars for picture taking, we tell them to stomp their feet when it is time to start their engines. It is a blast!
To make the bulletin board letters, I cut black construction paper to 81/2 x 11, chose a font that was outline only, put one letter per page and ran it through my printer. Then I added the yellow chalk lines to make it look like a "road."
