Parent Guide to Writing

Help! My Kid Is Not Writing a Thing!

There is a wide variation among third-graders on the ease with which they write. Some students can sit down and write quickly and continuously about any topic while others may have only a few sentences written after thirty minutes. Here are three barriers that sometimes slow kids from writing fluently:

• Not knowing what to write - some students either because of lack of ideas, indecision, or perfectionism, cannot decide on what to write about. In this case, get your child to discuss the topic with you, help them to brainstorm ideas, and then tell them to write about something that they just said.

• Focus - writing requires the most concentration of any subject because it involves the creation of ideas and some students find it hard to sustain their focus over an extended period of time. In this case, minimize distractions, be patient, congratulate them when they work quickly, and require that they finish their writing before they engage in other activities.

• Spelling - Perfectionistic or unconfident writers may get hung up on how to spell a word. They may interrupt their train of thought to agonize over the spelling of a word or continually ask the parent or teacher how to spell words. In this case, encourage your child to make their best guess at the spelling and promise them that you will help them with their spelling when they are finished writing.

The Writers' Workshop Model

Students are taught the idea-gathering, drafting, revising, editing, publishing sequence. Students will generally work on pieces over one or more weeks. Students are expected to write compositions with opening, supporting, and concluding paragraphs.

• Idea-gathering - Students brainstorm people, events, places, or ideas that they may want to write about.

• Drafting - Students expand one of the topics into a narrative, essay, letter, report, or poem.

• Revising - Students reread their work alone, with a peer, and/or with a teacher and decide which parts of their writing to embellish, delete, reorganize, or supplement.

• Editing - Students carefully inspect their writing alone, with a peer, and/or with a teacher to improve conventions such as punctuation, sentence structure, or verb tense.

• Publishing - Students rewrite or type their final draft, illustrate if necessary, and share with the class.

Of course, writing is not confined to the writers' workshop time. Writing is also integrated into reading, math, science, and social studies activities.

The Six Traits of Writing

The Six Traits of Writing is a framework to assess the quality of students' writing from Kindergarten through high school. Here are the six traits:

• Ideas: using lots of details and interesting information in your writing.

• Organization: writing in an orderly structure with paragraphs containing topic sentences and supporting evidence.

• Conventions: making our writing easy to read by using correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.

• Word Choice: using compelling and varied words to add clarity and detail to our writing.

• Sentence Fluency: varying the length and the beginnings of our sentences to make our writing flow in an easy-to-read manner.

• Voice: adding your personal voice to your writing, writing from the heart, creating interest and excitement as opposed to boredom.