Writing Strand Blog Post

Teaching Students to Love Writing and Be Successful at It!

By: Zachary Gill

Introduction

     Hello once again to my readers! The following post will look at an essential component of the language arts curriculum, writing. As students go through their educational journey from grade 1 all the way to post-secondary students learn how to progressively become more sophisticated writers. In order to teach our students to be successful and literate members of society we must not only how to comprehend texts on a variety of platforms, but we also must teach them how to create their own ideas and express them in a structured fashion. This post will focus on how to teach early writers just beginning their writing journeys.

Resource Critique

     As I began to explore this topic I began a search to look for a resource that could provide some helpful techniques that teachers could use to assist students in junior grade levels in their writing. One resource I found which aided me in this endeavour was a blog post that I found using Pinterest entitled 8 Smart Strategies for Teaching Writing (found here:http://www.theclassroomkey.com/2015/08/8-smart-strategies-for-teaching-writing.html). Although these strategies were not formed into groups I noticed that the list could be broken down into two categories: how to introduce writing structure, and how to keep students engaged in their writing. Some of the strategies recommended to introduce structure included colour coding to display the different features of a text, using mentor texts as examples of how writers add structure as well as stylistic elements in their writing, adding to the students vocabulary by telling them to add certain words to their writing, or simply demonstrating how to think aloud and put it on paper. On top of this, the article also gives the reader helpful ways they can keep their students excited during the writing process, which can sometimes be long and arduous for younger students. These tips included creating a balance between prompt and free choice writing, peer conferencing so students can display their work and provide feedback to their classmates, and creating fun incentives to keep students motivated like some sort of reward when the task is complete. Overall, this piece is very helpful in helping teachers formulate ways to introduce such an important topic while keeping students engaged throughout the process.
Additional Resources

     In order to build on this resource I continued to look for resources which could assist the smart strategies article. The first type of resources I began to look for was resources that could help teachers get students excited about writing and get them to begin. One resource I discovered to be helpful was an article called 18 Fun and Simple Creative Writing Activities (found here:https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/18-creative-writing-activities.) which lists activities that are not only fun to participate in, but also provides prompts to help students begin to write ideas down. Another article to add on this is one called 3 Strategies to Fire Up Hesitant Writers (found here:https://www.edutopia.org/blog/3-strategies-improve-student-writing-ali-parrish) which shows teachers how to get students to communicate their ideas orally then put it on paper. This helps students who are full of ideas but struggle with writing them.

     I also began to look for resources which can help teachers teach writing structure. One interesting article I found which focuses on modelling writing called To Teach Effective Writing, Model Effective Writing (found here:https://www.edutopia.org/blog/teach-and-model-effective-writing-david-cutler) talks about the importance that teachers demonstrate writing to their students by writing in front of them and providing feedback. Finally, below is a video which illustrates some of the challenges that students face when writing is introduced and how teachers can overcome these obstacles.

Classroom Applications

     Each of these resources are so helpful because they can be easily applied to the classroom. For example, many of the fun activities to get students to start writing can help students get engaged in their writing. Many of these prompts can be catered to serve students interests, like if a student enjoys playing hockey then you could offer that student a prompt to start writing about that. Or you could have a conversation with a student about a writing topic then teach them how to put those ideas down on paper. Finally, the smart strategies for teaching writing can easily be used by teachers in order to know how to model writing to their students while keeping them interested throughout the process. Here is a visual way you could use to demonstrate writing structure.

"Organized Paragraph Lesson Plan Idea" (online image) Retrieved from: http://myclassroomideas.com/how-to-write-organized-paragraphs-lesson-plan-idea/. 

Curriculum Expectations

     Although these ideas could be applied to a variety of grade levels, I believe it would be best suited for grade 4 and it covers a plethora of curriculum expectations. Since these resources mainly focus on teaching students to just start collecting ideas and writing them down I think it would fulfill this overall expectation: “Generate, gather, and organize ideas and information to write for an intended purpose and audience.” In addition to this it also fulfills this specific expectation: “Sort and classify ideas and information for their writing in a variety of ways.” On top of this, these resources also discuss writing structure and building vocabulary so it fulfills these expectations: “Use specific words and phrases to create an intended impression” and “Use sentences of different lengths and structures.”