Enabling the Best Writer's

Writing ... provides students with powerful opportunities to learn about themselves and their connections to the world. Through writing, students organize their thoughts, remember important information, solve problems, reflect on a widening range of perspectives, and learn how to communicate effectively for specific purposes and audiences. They find their voice and have opportunities to explore other voices. By putting their thoughts into words and supporting the words with visual images in a range of media, students acquire knowledge and deepen their understanding of the content in all school subjects. Writing also helps students to better understand their own thoughts and feelings and the events in their lives.

                                                                                             

                                                                                             - Ontario Curriculum 1-8 Language (p.12)

            

When I was a student I remember always enjoying the writing aspect of school, and in terms of assessment I excelled when I had the opportunity to write down and explain my thoughts. As a teacher, I have seen some students have an aversion to writing for school purposes and I asked myself why is this? Is it because they are not engaged in the material that they have to write about? Is it because they are not confident in their writing ability? Or do they not feel confident in being able to communicate that way?

            I have a grade 3 student that I work with who has a tendency to rush through his work, and when it comes to writing he creates very short sentences. Although when he verbally explains his thoughts, he goes into rich detail and talks forever! Instead of doing traditional comprehension questions after reading a story I tried to do a “Genius hour” project with him. This was a new activity that I had never executed before, but had recently done one myself through tech class. I let him chose the topic, we did the research together (using various sources, text and media). After completing the research and compiling thoughts on a mind web, I had him create his own picture book with “Storybird” where he wrote the paragraphs and chose the images. Once he was finished, I had him go through and edit any mistakes, or fix sentence structure. This was a great way to keep him engaged and practicing his thinking skills, reading and comprehension, and finally his writing skills.

Curriculum Expectations

1. Generate, gather, and organize ideas and information to write for an intended purpose and audience;
2. Draft and revise their writing, using a variety of informational, literary, and graphic forms and stylistic elements appropriate for the purpose and audience;
3. Use editing, proofreading, and publishing skills and strategies, and knowledge of language conventions, to correct errors, refine expression, and present their work effectively;
4. Reflect on and identify their strengths as writers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful at different stages in the writing process.

Writing Resources

The resource I looked at for writing is called “The Best Part of Me” project and can be found at http://lessonswithlaughter.com/the-best-part-of-me/ .  Although the full lesson plan is located at this website, http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/best-part-me . This project encourages students to look at all the positive aspects about themselves, and write about it to be shared around the classroom. This project can incorporate the media strand, or art by incorporating an image/visual aspect to the assignment. This assignment can be altered or modified to fit the class level, and can be as long or as short as you want it. If you wanted to do it over a span of time you could have students come up with one “best of me” a week, and by then end they create a book of all the best things about themselves. The assignment can have a peer and self-editing component that helps with writing skills, as well as practice for giving constructive feedback to peers. What I love about this assignment is that there are different ways you can go about teaching this lesson, and it can be used in most J/I grades. It is also a great way to start the school year, and have students get to know each other.

Writing In the Classroom

While in my placement class I’ve noticed that a lot of students are struggling with the basics of writing in terms of sentence structure, types of sentences, different narratives, the use of adjectives and nouns, as well as verb tenses. I found a resource called the “interactive notebook” and it is essentially a guide/tip book based on these common writing problems. The great thing about this idea is that it can be done electronically or hardcopy. The resource can be found here.

Another common problem is students need a remind of how to format essays and paragraphs. This is where anchor charts around the classroom or in their writing books can be a great resource to have students refer to. While searching for resources I found a great essay outline template that teachers can have students fill out while they are formulating ideas, arguments, and proof points. The outlines can be found here.