• STRATEGIES

• Review the purpose of an introduction and how it sets up the reader for what is coming next. 

• Provide students with a text that is missing an introduction, then have students write an introduction for the text. 

• Alternatively, provide students with an introduction, then have students write the rest of the text based on the introduction. You can also provide students with introductions of varying quality to further illustrate the importance of a well-crafted introduction. 

• Explicitly teach students how to use a variety of transitional words and phrases to connect similar or dissimilar ideas. 

• Support students in using imagery in their writing by asking students to identify imagery in the books they are reading, and then demonstrating for students how they can emulate that in their own writing by using the book as a mentor text.

Insight #1: Whatever concepts students learn about in reading, ensure they are intentionally including those concepts in their writing. 

o For example:  If students are learning about metaphors, develop writing assignments in which students are expected to attempt to include metaphors in their writing.  If students are learning about the problem/solution informational text structure, develop writing assignments that require students to use that text structure in their informational writing. 

Insight #2: Employ a wide variety of strategies to help students determine the best way to organize their writing. 

o Strategies to help students organize their writing include:  

Showing students writing exemplars and having them notice and name what makes the sample an exemplar. 

• Students should reference this list of characteristics when they are writing in an effort to emulate the characteristics.  Giving students sentence strips and having them order the sentences in a way that creates the most logical, smooth progression of ideas.  Providing students with the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence or paragraph and having them fill in the missing portions of text. 

• At the sentence level, this could look like leaving a transition word blank and having students fill in a transition word based on context. 

• At the paragraph level, this could look like leaving a sentence(s) out and having students fill in the missing text with a sentence(s) that makes sense based on context.  Teaching how certain transition words signal a relationship between parts of a sentence. 

• For example, the use of “but” typically means that the information before and after the transition is contradictory.