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Vocabulary terms-
Cursive writing- A type of writing with the characters joined.
Gradual Release Method- The teacher moves from assuming all the responsibility for performing a task to the students assume all the responsibility of a task.
Writing Process- The writing process is the process that students should practice and take their writing assignments through. The writing process includes, pre-writing, rough draft, revision, second draft, editing, publishing and evaluation (Buechler, Anna).
People have preconceived notions about people based on their writing ability. If a piece of writing is filled with spelling errors or incomplete sentences people assume that the writer may be illiterate or lack of writing skills. When applying for a job your resume is your first impression. If there are errors in your resume that could be reason your resume is overlooked. Writing skills are necessary for life. For children, writing will always be part of their everyday routine in a classroom. Writing instruction should be explicit and the teachers should be giving students multiple strategies that students can use while writing. As students continue to move further through their academic career, writing will become more intense and challenging, which makes writing instruction at a young age incredibly important.
Writing allows children to put their thoughts down on paper. It’s a way for students to express themselves in another way. Students expanding their vocabulary allows them to use new and different words to better articulate their feelings or thoughts. Writing is also one of the most common ways for teachers to assess students’ comprehension. Often when teachers want to determine if students understood what they read by summarizing the text. Students need explicit instruction from teachers to understand vocabulary and writing strategies that they can use. The reading rockets website mentions, “Young writers need instruction. They do not improve their writing skills simply because teachers require them to write. Children need explicit scaffolding, constructed within expertly delivered instructional conversations that address the language, knowledge, and strategies required for problem solving in writing. Effective writing instruction provides richly textured opportunities for students’ conceptual and linguistic development” (ReadingRockets). Writing in elementary levels should be a collaborative effort. The teacher should be model and prompt students then give the students their own time to make their own decisions, while simultaneously encouraging the students. Students writing abilities are only as good as their teachers’ ability to instruct their students (Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers).
Visual of the Writing Process
Editing and Revising Bookmark
Writing process-
Prewriting- Students will brainstorm using lists of words or phrases, or using a graphic organizer.
Rough draft- First writing of the piece. Students take your ideas and formulate them into sentences, students should know the purpose and genre before they write.
Revise- During this stage students are improving their writing. Students are revising their ideas, content, organization, voice, word choice and sentence fluency. Teachers may have students participate in peer revisions.
Second Draft- Students will rewrite their writing assignment making changes from their peer revisions or changes to the organization, sentence fluency, content or word choice.
Edit- During this stage students are checking for grammar, punctuation, spelling and capitalization errors. Teachers may also have students participate in peer editing.
Publishing- Students are almost done. Using their best hand writing or a computer to polish their final piece of writing for presentation.
Evaluation- Teachers and other students will give feedback to further improve writing. Teachers don’t need to evaluate too much with every assignment. However, if there were certain components that the assignments required the teacher should underline them to make sure that they used them correctly.
6 traits of writing-
Ideas- The main message of the writing assignment. The ideas control the writing, the ideas you choose to include determine when and where your writing needs to go, ideas are strengthened by facts, examples, details and definitions.
Organization- The internal structure of the piece, or how students put their ideas together so it makes sense. The writing should have purposeful and a logical sequence of ideas.
Voice- The personal tone and flavor of the author’s message. The voice should be appropriate for your audience, purpose and task. The 4 C’s of voice, clear, confident, convincing and consistent.
Word Choice- The vocabulary a writer chooses to convey meaning. If our writing is going to be powerful word choices must also be interesting.
Sentence Fluency- The rhythm and flow of the language. Sentence lengths should vary, but writing should sound natural.
Conventions- The mechanical correctness, spelling and punctuation should be correct.
Presentation- How the writing actually looks on the page.
Genre writing-
Descriptive- Students observe carefully and choose precise language. Examples- comparisons, descriptive sentences.
Expository- Students collect and synthesize information. Examples- alphabet books and essays
Journals and letters- Students write to themselves and to specific audiences. Examples- personal letters and personal journal entries.
Narrative- Students retell familiar stories, develop sequels for stories they have read, write stories about themselves or create original stories. Example- Original short stories, story scripts.
Persuasive- Persuasion is convincing someone to agree with your view point or cause using appeals to logic, moral character and emotion. Examples- Advertisement and persuasive letters.
Poetry- Students create word pictures and play with rhyme and other stylistic devices as they create poems. Examples- Free verse poems or color poems (Buechler, Anna).
Writing with primary students and intermediate students-
Primary students should learn basic strategies to help them with the writing process, but as the children get older they should be introduced to more complex strategies. These writing strategies should be taught explicitly and directly through a gradual release of responsibility from the teacher to the student. The teacher should be clear about when and how to use these strategies throughout the writing process and indicate that some of these strategies can be used for more than one component of the writing process. Older students focus less on basic writing skill and more on communicating their ideas. But, with younger students’ teachers need to devote more time and attention to students acquiring these skills. The teacher should also explicitly help students understand the purpose and audience for their writing. If teachers don’t do this, students may only feel as though they are writing for their teacher. Teachers need to promote students’ success in writing for students to gain confidence in their writing abilities (Effective Framework for Primary-Grade Guided Writing Instruction).
Website- https://www.learner.org/workshops/middlewriting/images/pdf/HomeBestPrac.pdf
This website was created by Charles Whitaker who has a Ph.D. Whitaker goes on to list eight different of the “Best Practices in Teaching Writing”. This website seems to be aimed towards educators that need tips or advice on teaching writing within the classroom. Whitaker talks about a positive atmosphere for writing, reading and learning, organization for writing, giving students meaningful reasons to write, writing regularly, giving students feedback, giving students opportunities to collaborate and conducting mini lessons on writing. Each of these topics have several sub topics and tips that teachers can use to implement into the classroom. Even though this website seems to be targeting educators, parents may be interested to know if their children’s teachers are using these strategies or parents could try to give their children a reason to write at home.
3 apps-
Writing Challenge for Kids ($2.99)-
This writing app was designed to help students’ express creativity, have fun while writing, spark inspiration and improve writing skills. This app targets children from age seven to age fourteen, who want to write their own stories or adults that want to write stories or improve their writing skills. This app gives children a prompt to start writing a story and set a timer to every minute or any duration that is preferred. After the chosen amount of time the app will give a new prompt to add new ideas, characters, sentences, places or actions to the plot. This app can be implemented at home or in schools and with this app writing is fun (Writing Challenge for Kids on the App Store).
Writing Wizard for Kids ($4.99)-
Writing Wizard is designed to help children learn how to trace letters, numbers and words through a system that was carefully designed to maintain motivation. Writing Wizard has nine different fonts, gives fifty plus animated stickers, sound effects and interactive games that animate letters at the end of tracing. This app allows children to practice uppercase and lowercase letters, cursive, numbers and words. It also has the ability to create an individualized word list with recorded audio for each word. It’s fully customizable for the specific needs for every child, and tracks progress based on reports that display what the child has traced. This app was created for children to practice writing but this app can be implemented at home or in the classroom. Teachers are able to implement it for individual students, small groups or as a whole class. This app should be used with younger students learning to write letters, numbers or cursive, English language learners, or students that need more help with writing (Writing Wizard for Kids on the App Store).
LetraKid: Learn to write ABC (Free)-
LetraKid is an educational game targeting children ages four to eight years old. This app is designed is help children learn pre-cursive, and print block hand wrtiting correctly and have fun while doing so. This app hopes that children learn to recognize letter shapes, learn perfect alphabet pronunciation, the correct letter formation, develop fine motor skills for hand writing and using a stylus pen will help improve pencil grip. LetraKid offers 16 languages with full support for interface, human native voices for letter, number pronunciation and full official alphabets and five progressive levels with color coded glyphs that allows parents and teachers an instant evaluation of the child’s progress and most exercised letters. This app wanted to beneficial for parents to implement at home but also beneficial for teachers and schools. The creators of LetraKid believe that creating a fun game that utilizes hand writing mechanics but avoiding random rewards that hinder the learning process appeal to the educational purpose for children. This app could be implemented in schools as a fun way that students are able to practice if they are not ready to practice with a pencil yet (LetraKid - Learn to Write ABC Review).
Strategies-
1- RAFT writing
Raft stands for Role of writer, Audience, Format and Topic. This strategy works for grades pre-k all the way through high school. Raft can be used before reading, during reading and after reading. It can also be used with individual students, small groups or as a whole class. Raft allows students to be creative and use their imagination to write. Raft helps students write from different viewpoints and learn more writing skills. To start, the teacher will either determine the different components of raft (role of writer, audience, format and topic) that the students will write about or the teacher can give the students the opportunity to choose the different components. After choosing the different components allow students to brainstorm what they may write about for a few minutes. Then allow students to write freely for 15 to 30 minutes. Teachers can use raft in the form of a graphic organizer to help guide students if they need more help. This strategy is a fun way for students to experiment with different genres and view points. The writing can be silly or serious.
2- Elkonin Sound boxes
This strategy targets spelling and phonics and it is easy to do. The teacher first draws boxes that match the number of phonemes within a word. Then write the grapheme representing the phoneme into the appropriate boxes. Place a small reward like a cheerio or an M&M above each box. As the student says each sound within the box they pull the reward down, so the reward rests in the box. However, this strategy can be adapted to work on other things. For example, to work on letter and sound association, follow the same protocol, except do not put the graphemes within the box. Instead place the rewards above the boxes and as the teacher says the word and the sounds are heard, pull the reward down. After all the M&M’s are pulled down the teacher will ask the student “do you know which letter goes with that sound when we read the word? Would you put it in this box?” The students can make connections between letters and sounds. This strategy is so easy to use however, it can only be used one on one with teacher and student. It can be used for elementary aged students, but words should be appropriate for grade level and age.
3- Give it a go Guided Spelling
Use the scaffolding strategy to help students actively problem solve their way through spelling difficult words. For this strategy these symbols are necessary…
+ = correct
O = omit a letter
^ = insert a consonant
⌄ = insert vowel
~ = change letter order
Allow students to attempt to write the word for the first time. Then use the symbols above to provide feedback. After giving feedback allow the student to attempt to write it again, independently. If students move past a 3rd attempt, the teacher or instructor should praise their efforts and supply correct spelling as it would be seen “in a book”. This strategy is not appropriate for students in the derivational stage.
4- Guided Writing Response to Reading
This strategy is used after the student has read a book during a guided reading session. Provide the student with a genre based sentence frame. For example, for non-fiction the prompt could be, “I learned that….”. Before the student starts to write, the instructor or teacher should engage the student in an oral discussion to complete the provided prompt. Then allow the student to write what was just said in the discussion while using the prompt. If students make spelling errors let the student finish writing the sentence. Invite the student to reread in hopes that the student will notice the spelling error. If the student does not notice the error tell the student “One of these three words is spelled incorrectly.” When the student identifies the word, print the misspelled word. Provide feedback to the student using the same symbols from “Give it a go, Guided spelling”. Then invite students to try to spell the word again. Continue for a third try and then simply provide correct version if needed. The last step is publishing, publish a book of the students guided writing responses it should be made of at least five to eight responses. All capitalization and punctuation follows expected editing conventions (Winters).
5- Moments with Strong Feelings
This strategy can be used with students from grades K-8 and any genre. This strategy works on generating and collecting ideas. The teacher will instruct the students to choose a strong feeling like enjoyment, embarrassment or joy. Then instruct the the students to think about memories you have that connect to that feeling. Instruct them to try to use details that show the feeling of that moment. Then have students write about that feeling and the memories that they remember associated with that strategy. This strategy can also be adapted by choosing a book with a character that has strong emotions within the text. Point out to the students how the author conveys that feeling and how authors can get inspiration. After reading a book that has a lot of emotions then the teachers can have students participate in this strategy and create their own short story (Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers).
Buechler, Anna. (2018, May 23). Writing Process Flipped Classroom. [Guided Notes for EDUC 329]
Buechler, Anna. (2018, May 24). Six Traits of Writing Flipped Classroom. [Guided Notes for EDUC 329]
Effective Framework for Primary-Grade Guided Writing Instruction. (2013, November 14). Retrieved June 4, 2018, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/effective-framework-primary-grade-guided-writing-instruction
E. (n.d.). LetraKid - Learn to Write ABC Review. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.educationalappstore.com/app/letrakid-learn-to-write-abc
L. (2013, August 08). Writing Wizard for Kids on the App Store. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/writing-wizard-for-kids/id631446426?mt=8
S. (2013, August 16). Writing Challenge for Kids on the App Store. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/writing-challenge-for-kids/id687393994?mt=8
Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers. (2017, December 18). Retrieved June 4, 2018, from http://www.readingrockets.org/article/teaching-elementary-school-students-be-effective-writers
Winters, R. (n.d.). Core Strategies For Supporting Reading Development[Word Doc]. Winona: Winona State University.
Whitaker, C. (n.d.). Best Practices in Teaching Writing[Scholarly project]. Retrieved June 4, 2018, from https://www.learner.org/workshops/middlewriting/images/pdf/HomeBestPrac.pdf
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