Essentials for Teaching Writing

 

My Dear Bloggers,

Everything I learned in LIT102 was straightforward and to the point, easy to understand, which will be beneficial to both me as a teacher and my students when I return to the classroom, making it nothing short of exceptional. My colleagues displayed their chosen method really well, and I was able to comprehend how it is to be done within the classroom, even if some went over the allocated three minutes for each demonstration. Two of my favorite demonstrations were freewriting, for it was simple to execute and I see myself doing a lot of this within different subject areas especially to get an insight into student's prior understanding of a particular topic. Writing in response to Text, was the other strategy demonstrated that I liked. I can see myself using this strategy when teaching comprehension along with other subject areas where reading is also required. Using a concise comprehension passage and a Venn diagram made understanding the story simple. Unfortunately, in the end,  I was unable to finish the "Making Pizza" sequential writing task in time to demonstrate my "text model" writing technique using a sequential graphic organizer. 

 

What were two of your favorite writing strategies demonstrated by your colleagues?

 

What will help me to teach writing?

I'm sure you have asked this question many times for the purpose of improving your students’ writing within the classroom. Here are seven essentials for teaching writing: -

• ·         Children need time to write
• ·         Children need regular responses to their writing
• ·         Children need to publish their writings
• ·         Children need to choose most of the topics they write about
• ·         Children need to hear their teachers talk through                 what they are doing as they write
• ·         Children need to maintain collections of their work to             create a portrait of their writing history
• ·         Children need teachers who explicitly teach writing

Teaching writing explicitly can include:

1.        Students being taught how to gather and organize their ideas before they start writing which can include the use of graphic organizers (for example) in brainstorming ideas.

2.      Students learning about the strategies, including planning, revising, and editing. This can be done repeatedly as students develop their writing.

3.      Students being taught strategies and procedures for summarizing any reading material they have read. This will help them to solidify their recent understanding of what they have read and help them add to their previous knowledge.

4.      Students being aware of the purpose in which they are writing.

5.      Students being taught how to write increasingly complex sentences, starting from simple and gradually increasing as they write more daily.

 

Furthermore, learning this information can help you as a teacher create excellent writers by allotting pupils 45 to 60 minutes per day to write. Students will be inspired to write in the classroom as a result of the frequent writing opportunities, which will help them develop their writing skills. Adding to this, giving pupils the freedom to choose their own topics results in writing pieces where they may express themselves freely since they have firsthand knowledge of the topic they have selected. Hence, teachers can help children expand on their prior knowledge through explicit teaching. Regular feedback on students' work, whether it be read aloud or displayed in a gallery walk, can result in extremely strong writing pieces because students can learn where they might have erred in their writing or sentence structures, where more information is required, and how to bounce ideas off other students' or teachers' thoughts through comments on written text done by the students. These completed writing exercises can be gathered daily and kept as a journal so that teachers and students can track students' development and they can learn from their mistakes.

 

 

What do you think about the seven essentials for teaching writing?