Hello, and welcome to my blogspot. If you are an elementary school teacher in search of ideas to teach writing in the classroom, you have come to the right place. At the end of each week I will describe my writing lessons and provide tips, suggestions, and lesson ideas for you to try out.
Last week was the first week of the school year. I met my new third grade class of 29 students and was rather pleased to see that they were bursting with enthusiasm. I like to have a friendly, nonthreatening atmosphere at the start of school. So, I don't teach any formal writing lessons. Instead, I place emphasis on two activities.
1. Journal writing;
2. Exposure to stories that have strong characters and plots.
Daily journal writing is extremely important. It exercises the writing muscle. My students learn from Day 1 that the first thing they do when they enter the classroom is to get out their journals. There's a topic on the board with some directions to guide their writing. (I usually discuss the topic as well when everyone has settled in.) Each day I select a topic of a different genre. I think it's incredibly important to vary writing tasks to keep up the enthusiasm. These are the types of journal writing I assign:
1. Personal narrative
2. Fantasy, such as What If You Could Fly?
3. Expository, such as Describe How to Play Basketball
4. Persuasive, where they write their opinions on an issue
In the first week of school I have a pretty low key attitude toward journal writing. I want the kids to feel relaxed about the activity. The first week is also a learning experience for me. I want to see what my students can do without much guidance.
On Monday, my students wrote down their feelings about the first day of school.
Describe how you feel about being a third grader. What are some things you are looking forward to doing this year?
They seemed eager to put brand new pencil to clean white paper. A silence fell as 29 kids thought about how they were feeling and recorded it on paper. One student seemed confused. When I asked her if she knew what to do she shook her head. After a few exchanges with her I realized she was a struggling writer. So I placed a lined Post-it note on her desk and had her do an oral response to the topic. I wrote it down on the Post-it note and she copied it into her journal.
As I walked around the classroom I realized I had a very wide range of abilities. Some kids were churning out sentences and others were stuttering through their first sentence. I allow ten minutes for journal writing. A student wrote two sentences and then claimed to be done about five minutes later. I announced to the class that they were not allowed to be done until I asked them to stop writing.
After ten minutes I asked if anyone would like to share. More than half the class raised their hands. This made me happy. Clearly, they were an enthusiastic bunch.
Typically, journal time in my class lasts about 15 minutes. Two minutes to explain the topic, eight minutes of writing, and five minutes (or less) of discussion and sharing.
The rest of the week, I kept the topics pretty simple and limited them to narratives where they got to describe themselves, their families, friends, interests, etc.
A second activity I emphasize in the first week (weeks, actually) is high quality, high interest literature. This has a two fold purpose. First, it's a way to get kids excited about being back at school. And second, it forms the basis for teaching writing in future months. Every day this past week I read a story about the Greek heroes from Greek mythology. The kids were predictably utterly captivated by the stories. They hung onto every syllable. I could feel their eyes on me as I read. Every detail intrigued them. But the best part about these stories is that the characters are strong and complex and the plots follow a perfect arc. After I read the story, we do a story diagram together. Characters, setting, plot. The kids have absolutely no trouble describing the problem in the story and then summarizing the beginning, middle, and end.
If you want your students to become strong writers, You have to expose them to the best stories and writing that you can get your hands on.
I hope you found this entry helpful. Do visit again next week for more ideas.
