ch6 writing assessment O'Malley&Valdez

Writing was a subject that I loved personally growing up, but after learning about rubrics and scoring guides and having to judge someones writing, I've pretty much avoided doing too much free time, pleasurable writing. Now, I'm noticing that I am not expecting too much writing from my students like I planned to this year. Instead I see that I am focusing on the kind of stuff from the kindergarten GLEs like handwriting formation, writing name with capital letter, and going from top to bottom, left to right. The assessment from our district for this subject at the kindergarten level does not seem to expect too much either and the purpose is for level placement and most likely more for accountability compared to the purposes given here despite not being a bilingual district which we should be considering our high percentage of classified LEP students.
Anyways....
I was surprised to see that, "The types of knowledge required in writing go far beyond these familiar elements." Those four elements are: knowledge of content; procedural knowledge for organization; knowledge of discourse structures, syntactic forms, and conventions; and procedural knowledge for integrating all the other types of knowledge.! This last one blew me away. I was like- wow, I have that?
I was glad to see the information about Process writing in which I like the information about the conferencing part. I've heard about Writing Across the Curriculum before, but have not managed to incorporate it into my primary grade classrooms. I could imagine doing it quite easily with fluent writers, but with beginning writers- I find that I take dictation way too much for this to be effective right now. I hope I can learn to do it right.
So, as you can see, this chapter is more applicable to the teachers teaching the higher grades, but I'm sure there's room for adaptations (with lots of drawings and dictations? only?) as required by the state GLEs for kindergartners. Prompts are ok if relevant to the students.
I'm familiar with the 6 traits, and the 6+1 writing traits, and I have introduced it to the students , but I tend to get stuck on that first stage and not following through with the whole thing- even though the writer's workshop stuff is awesome, I think I need at least one more year with kindergartners to know how to effectively manage the time to do everything I've always wanted to do besides the adopted curriculum...
The scoring guides and rubrics I use for this subject at this grade level (K) has been the GLE's. Is that cheating? Still, I like the Figure 6.3 Developmental Descriptors of Writing, which I could use for instruction and assessment, and as a communication tool with parents since it looks friendly. Now, the figure 6.4 Process Writing Checklist provided me with great definitions of the postwriting strategies.
There's no doubt that self-assessments in writing are crucial, or else you'd end up like me- lost interest in pleasurable writing. I need to do these beginning with the checklist formats like the surveys of interest and awareness, writing strategies and writing checklist the author's provided. The information on the writing assessment in instruction will be one I plan to revisit a few times. And I plan to use the suggestion given about posting a writing sample and having students score it and I list the criteria they're using- hopefully sooner than later.