The Important Business of Teaching Kids to Write

 

         I love to write.  I'm not the most artistic person in the world with crayons, paint, or a canvas, but give me a pencil and a paper and I am ready to create.  Words are my paints, the page my canvas, and the pencil my brush.  I wrote before I became a teacher.  I wrote in literary journals in college, for the newspaper, and I free lanced before I decided on making teaching my life path.  Even as a child I filled journals with ideas, thoughts, and in my teens I wrote each and every volcanic emotion down.  Writing, simply put, is part of my fabric.  

        However, when I became a teacher, I was surprised that many didn't share my enthusiasm for writing.  Looking back now at my first fourth grade class, filled with bright, enthusiastic learners, I can see how writing was a struggle.  For the majority of them, they were trying to express themselves with voice, fluency, and proficiency in a language that they didn't speak at home.  As a new teacher, I didn't know what to do.  We just kept writing, we practiced D.O. L. we talked about writing, and I modeled.  All fine strategies, but not enough. 

       After 20 years in the classroom, I finally feel good about how I'm developing writers.  After countless trainings on language acquisition, developing voice, teaching structure, syntax, mentor texts, common core writing, and many years in the classroom, I am seeing some wonderful success, especially with my littles, my first graders.  Some come in scared to write and scared to make a mistake.  Some come in bold, writing strings and strings of letters that translated, (by them to me), tell fantastic adventures.  Some come in writing beautiful looking simple sentences that tell me things in a matter of fact way.  All of these little learners come in with the ability to grow, change, put in hard work, and leave knowing writing can unlock so much.

       The purpose of this post is to share, in little snippets, some of the things that I have learned on teaching writing.  I have a student teacher this year and she asked me the other day, "How do you start to teach writing?"  She got me thinking.  It is such a process, such an adventure, and often an adventure that you don't fully experience in the credential program.  So, in a way, these posts are for her.  Since she came when we were already in full swing, I'll try to break it down a bit.  I'll start with the overview and then dive deeper into each area, hopefully hitting interventions as well.  Hope this helps someone!

What the day looks like (The writing parts of our day):

Power Writing- We start the day with power writing.  This is sort of a drop everything and write time where we build our writing stamina.  This is timed writing where we keep pencils moving the whole time.  We are up to about 15 minutes before we start to get the wiggles. Some want to go longer. Kids can always continue in our Daily 5 block.  This writing time is not just self- selected or prompt driven.  We brainstorm two topics.  Kids have choice and a spring board. 

Fiction/Non-fiction learning blocks- Both of these blocks contain daily writing as we used paired fiction and non-fiction texts.  We write all three text types simultaneously so we write them often.  The only way to do this is to write through most parts of the day. In these blocks we study structure, mentor texts, foundational skills, and much more.

Designated Writing Time:  This time is dedicated to developing and diving deeper into each of the text types.  We use an interactive writing handbook, do mini-lessons, focus on mentor sentences, analyze writing, and most importantly write.  This time especially highlights how to write all parts of a piece:  introductions, conclusions, facts/details, reasons/details, and events/details.  We also focus on individual writing goals. 

Daily 5:  My favorite part of the day.  Those of you familiar with Daily 5 know the power of choice.  This is our time to research, read, practice skills, and most importantly write.  I provide many opportunities for the kids to write during their work on writing time.  They can write narrative stories, informative, opinion, poetry, letters, lists, etc.  They can also write in different formats.  They can write books, big books, iMovie scripts, blog posts, and much more.  Technology has definitely sparked the kids love for writing in the last few years as there are many amazing apps that motivate and excite these little guys.  I'll be talking more about this when I dive deeper into this subject.

Feedback/Author's Chair/Movie Screenings:  Essential for growth, feedback is important to our class as we all strive to be better writers.  In first grade, feedback starts with a lot of structure, but eventually ends up natural and wonderful.  

It is my goal to try to share a little about each area and more in the coming weeks/months.  Sign up to the right on my blog to receive email updates when I publish new posts or just check back!

 Warmly,