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I shared with resource in our drive space as well.

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Inside: Teaching writing DOESN'T have to be complicated! With these simple strategies, you can improve students' writing without having to work so hard.
rs. Braun?

I turned around to an outstretched notebook in a kid's hands.

"I don't know what to do next," said the student.

I leaned closer to decipher the 2nd-grade handwriting. Then with my most positive I'll-guide-you-on-the-right-path tone, I gave the student an idea to run with.

I straightened up, ready to move about the class, peering over shoulders, offering feedback as needed.

My bubble was abruptly burst.

Standing behind me was a whole line of kids that didn't know what to do next!

Have you been there, too? What you need are writing strategies for students that break down a complicated process into pieces they can tackle.

What follows are some of the best methods for teaching writing that I discovered over the years:

Use Mentor Texts

If you wanted to learn how to decorate your mantle, you might look for great examples on Pinterest and then try to make yours look like that.

Similarly, kids can look at the work of published authors to see how a pro writes.

Mentor texts are published pieces that serve as a good example of the type of writing you're helping your students to produce.

If you're teaching how-to writing, find books about making crafts, cooking, or other DIY topics. If you're teaching report writing, look at nonfiction books.

Read these books (or parts of them) to your students.

Talk as a class about the special features you notice.

Make a list of these features (how-to books have numbered steps, pictures to match, sequence, etc.)

Mentor texts serve as a blueprint for your students as they begin to write their own pieces.

Demonstrate

Cooking shows are popular because it's easy to watch how a good cook puts together a recipe and then do the same yourself. Writing demonstrations are similar.

Write in front of your students and think aloud as you're doing it. Thinking aloud is a research-based teaching strategy. You are the proficient writer in the room and you want your students to begin modeling their thinking processes after yours.

Some writing skills you might demonstrate are:

brainstorming topics to write about

creating a plan for writing

orally rehearsing sentences and then writing them down

stretching out sounds in words for spelling

rereading and editing writing

looking for places to add more interesting vocabulary

making a final copy that incorporates editing and revisions

Use Sentence Starters

Staring at a blank page can be so intimidating!

Help kids get started with a list of possible sentence starters. Here's an example list of sentence starters that work well for opinion writing.

Join my weekly newsletter and as a bonus, you'll get the sentence starter page pictured above. Just click here to download and subscribe.

Color Coding

(you can find the pictured graphic organizer HERE)

Use color-coding to make writing organization obvious and to connect a student's plan to their draft.

1. Assign a different color to each element of a piece.

2. Mark whatever planning graphic organizer you're using with these colors.

3. During drafting, underline the sentences for each section with the appropriate color.

This technique helps students make sure nothing is left out and that everything is in the right order

Integrate Vocabulary

One of the things we know about teaching vocabulary is that it's not enough to talk about a word once. It needs to be seen, heard, and used several times before it is mastered.

Writing is the perfect place to incorporate some vocabulary instruction.

Choose two or three words that might be useful to students for the topic they are writing about. Teach these words, give example sentences, and share sentences where students were able to work them in.

You can either teach the words before students write their rough draft or teach them before students revise. You may want students to keep a record of these words in a notebook.

Use a Rubric

There's no point in making kids guess what they're aiming for with their writing.

Research shows that when students have criteria against which to judge their writing, they begin to internalize that criteria and use it when they write new pieces.

Try teaching critique lessons where you share a few short pieces of writing with different strengths and weaknesses and evaluate them with students using a rubric.

Talk about what made a piece successful and what could be better about it. Invite students to use the successful techniques in their own writing. Click on the picture to get a free copy of a personal narrative rubric that I like to use.

Peer Conferencing

Many students find working with a partner to be very motivating.

It's important to carefully structure peer writing conferencing because it can get out of hand easily.

Set a specific goal such as helping each other check for capital letters at the beginning of every sentence, rereading to make sure each sentence makes sense, or looking for words that could be traded out for something more interesting.

Another way to structure peer conferencing is to use the "Love and a Wish" system. Students read each other's writing. Then they share one thing they loved about it and one thing they wished. For example, maybe they loved how their partner described the taste of their birthday cake and they wished there was more about the games that were played at the party.

Create an Incentive

Taking a piece of writing from the planning process all the way to a final draft is a lot of work. Find a way to celebrate that work to keep students motivated.

A chance to share their work is motivating to students. You can build in sharing while you're roving the classroom. At the mid-point or the end of the lesson, have a few students share how they revised a sentence to add an interesting word or the great hook that they chose.

You can give students time to share their work with a neighbor. This way everyone gets to share in a short amount of time.

Allow students to share writing in those 5-minute blocks of time you find every now and then when you finished something else early.

A favorite writing incentive in my classroom was the "publishing party." After a 5 week writing unit, each student chose their best piece and we all sat in a circle and listened to each other's work.

At the end, we toasted to our hard work with a small cup of apple juice. Parents would share with me that this simple celebration really motivated their child to work hard in writing so they would have something great to read to the class.

If you're looking for resources to help you teach writing, check out the classroom-tested products HERE:

Follow my literacy board on Pinterest for more ideas!

Follow Hannah @ The Classroom Key's board Literacy on Pinterest.

Author: Hannah Braun

https://www.theclassroomkey.com

Hannah Braun is a former teacher with 8 years of experience in the classroom and a master's degree in early childhood education. She designs engaging, organized classroom resources for 1st-3rd grade teachers.

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Inside: Teaching writing DOESN'T have to be complicated! With these simple strategies, you can improve students' writing without having to work so hard. rs. Braun? I turned around to an outstretched notebook in a kid's hands. "I don't know what to do next," said the student. I leaned closer to decipher the 2nd-grade handwriting.

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The ISTE Student Standards guide educators toward student-driven learning practices that prepare students to thrive in an evolving technological landscape.

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NYS Next Generation Standards

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Great Blog Post to get us thinking about how to design the mini-unit

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In my first year of teaching I was expected to use a writer's workshop model where students almost always chose their own writing topics. This was before the Common Core standards and my district wasn't very concerned about what genres students wrote in, as long as they wrote. I could definitely tell you that in my students' opinion, professional wrestling was the best sport and puppies were the best pet. I knew this because of the sheer volume of random writing I saw on these two topics, not because my students were skilled at writing opinion pieces.

***I made a chart of helpful sentence starters that's perfect for writing folders. Get yours for free HERE!***

Things have changed and whether or not kids like it, opinion writing is now a staple genre in kindergarten through 5th grade. The good news is, teaching opinion writing doesn't have to be like pulling teeth. Here are four opinion writing ideas that you can put in place right away:

Choose Topics That Fire Them Up!

When presenting topic choices for opinion writing, the key is to think about what gets kids fired up. What are they constantly complaining about? What makes them mad? What do they argue about? What do they annoyingly beg for? What are some things that affect them that they've never even thought of? Here's a list of ideas to consider:

-How much homework should kids be given?
-What should the lunchroom offer that it doesn't already?
-How much recess should kids have?
-Should kids wear school uniforms?
-How much allowance should kids get?
-Which cartoon is the funniest?
-Should kids be allowed to use cell phones at school?
-Which football/baseball/soccer team is the best?
-Which book should the school library buy/buy more of?
-What should the school add to the playground?
-What kind of field trip should the class take?
-Which school rule should be changed?
-What pet should the class get?
-What is the best restaurant in town?
-Is it better to be smart or to be nice?
-Who should be given more money, schools or the military?
-Would you rather vacation to a big city or to the wilderness?
-Is life easier for boys or for girls?
-What one book should every kid read?
-Nominate a classmate for an award. Why do they deserve it?
-Should kids get paid to do chores?
-How much screen time should kids be allowed to have?
-How often should kids take a bath/shower?
-What is one thing that should be free for everyone?
-Should kids have to memorize math facts?
-Is it more important to know how to write or to know how to type?
-Should kids get paid for good grades?
-What one place should everyone visit?

Give Them A Jump Start With Sentence Starters

Staring at a blank page is the hardest part of the writing process for both kids and adults. I have found that the secret sauce for getting kids started is to provide them with potential sentence starters. It's so much easier to fill in the blank than to start from scratch.

***Get your free sentence starter chart HERE!***

A chart like this is perfect to put in student writing notebooks for reference. Opinion writing pieces would use mostly sentences starters from the second and third column. Eventually students become more confident and creative and they can move away from scripted sentence starters but this is a great place to start. You will be amazed by how much more mature your students' writing sounds when they start to incorporate some of these sentence starters.

Create a "Payoff"

As adults, when we write there is always a purpose. We write the principal an email to convince her to send us to a conference, we write instructions for a homework assignment, we write a newsletter to parents about upcoming events. Some of us have cultivated a love for writing and will write a poem or a narrative for our own enjoyment. When students write it is frequently because we told them to. For some kids, pleasing the teacher is motivation enough but others do much better when they have more of a pay off for the hard work for putting their ideas to paper, editing, revising, and producing a final copy. There are a variety of ways to create this motivation:

Give them an authentic audience - Students can write to the principal about their opinion on a school issue, to their parents about their opinion on an issue to home, to the PTA on their opinion about how fundraising money should be spent, to a government official about their opinion on a community matter

Give them an engaging project - Just writing their final copy on a plain piece of paper may not be very motivating to students. Try mixing it up with different kinds of publishing projects.

Write a brochure. The one pictured below is about a favorite place to visit. Students enjoy looking at travel brochures as examples. They could also write brochures about a favorite book, their opinion about the best sport, and a wide variety of other topics.

Write reviews. As a class you can write a book review and post it on Amazon. Students get very excited to see their own work on the internet and they feel that they have contributed to something big. Students can also write reviews about movies or restaurants and create a class book. They're probably familiar with the idea of assigning a certain number of starts out of five. Students enjoy reading the work of their peers and will recognize many of the restaurants or movies in the reviews.

Write award nominations. Assign each student the name of another student in the class. Each writer thinks about what their assigned subject is good at and gives them an award for that trait or skill. They write about why the person deserves the award.

Give them a chance to share - At the dinner table when a parent asks their child, "What did you do at school today?" lots of kids will say, "Nothing." So when a parent reports back to you with something their child came home excited about, you know you've struck an important chord. One of those golden nuggets that kids will rave about at home is a special writing sharing time. At the end of each unit, throw a publishing party or a book launch. The details are simple. Each student gets a chance to share their best piece with the class. At the end there's a little something special. For me it was a toast using small cups of apple juice. Kids felt so grown up as we honored their hard work. You can take your own spin on it, invite the principal or other special guests, invite parents, maybe ask some kids to bring cookies. When kids are in the trenches of writing, remind them that their hard work is important because they will want something good to share with their classmates at the publishing party.

Connect Steps with Color-Coding

The Common Core standards require that students use an introduction, reasons, and a conclusion in their opinion writing. These multiple sections can feel long, confusing, and insurmountable to some students. I found a game changer especially for struggling writers - color coding. Color coding isn't just for reading groups and supply buckets. Use color coding to connect the dots from the genre structure, to your students' planning, to their drafts. The color coding takes away a lot of the confusion and helps students to see how a big paragraph of writing is just made up of bite-sized sentences that they can take-on.

At the top of the graphic I have laid out the main sections of the genre and given each section a color. Next you can see a planning graphic organizer where each section is outlined in the correct color. Finally, there is an example draft where the sentence for each section is underlined in the assigned color. To help your students take it one piece at a time, you can demonstrate how you would write your pink sentence, then have them write their pink sentence. Then you demonstrate your green sentence and have them write their green sentence. When students are ready to write more they can add a detail in the green and yellow sections. (More on color-coding in narrative writing here.)

Follow along on Pinterest for more writing ideas:

Follow Hannah @ The Classroom Key's board Literacy on Pinterest.

Author: Hannah Braun

http://www.theclassroomkey.com

Hannah Braun is a former teacher with 8 years of experience in the classroom and a master's degree in early childhood education. She designs engaging, organized classroom resources for 1st-3rd grade teachers.

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Get Students Excited about Opinion Writing with these 4 Ideas

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In my first year of teaching I was expected to use a writer's workshop model where students almost always chose their own writing topics. This was before the Common Core standards and my district wasn't very concerned about what genres students wrote in, as long as they wrote.

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6 opinion writing prompts for grade 3.jpg

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CCLS aligned

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Students read articles and craft opinion essay in response.

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Next Generation Standards in ELA - Grade 3 (NYS)