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Teaching Writing Simplified With Strategies

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 I could not believe it but Ms. Quinn outdid herself this week. The completion of the group presentations really helped us experience the different parts of the writer’s workshop. The writer’s workshop is truly the best way to support and improve our students’ writing. 

After completing our own summary of the different parts of the writer’s workshop I can say that I now know what the students should be doing at the various stages. Did completing the summary help you understand the writer’s workshop more? 

We moved on to look at different scaffolding strategies. The four main strategies that were gathered from the video were :

  1. Frame Writing: This strategy uses an outline to support writing. It includes sentence starters that give a structure that allows the writer to focus on expressing their thoughts.

  2. Partial Piece: The students write a small portion instead of a whole piece. This helps students to focus on that section more and it gives teachers the opportunity to assess the students’ writing in stages. I found this strategy extremely interesting. We can even grade partial pieces and track student progress. What do you guys think?

  3. Oral Writing; This strategy was so simple and yet I never thought about it. The teacher compiles a writing piece based on student ideas. This allows the students to focus on creating their ideas while also seeing an example that they can follow.

  4. Gradual Release of Responsibility: This strategy to me is probably the most important when trying to get our students to become independent writers. The teacher gradually moves from assuming all the responsibility for performing a task to a point where the students can assume all of the responsibility. 

The steps of this strategy can be easily remembered by following this tip that Miss Quinn wrote on the board.


We also got to look at some additional scaffolding techniques.

Who knew that they were so many different strategies to help support student writing? Here are a few of the strategies that I found interesting and would like to utilize in my classroom.

  1. Use of the first language: the use of first language while writing can be seamlessly incorporated into dialogues that will allow students to improve their writing as well as work on their code-switching.

  2. Visual/ Realia: presenting items or images that are associated with the topic in the classroom can help to stimulate student creativity while writing. For example, if the teacher would like the students to write about carrots. By allowing students to observe an actual carrot they can describe the carrot more accurately based on texture or size. 

  3. Graphic Organizers: I will continue to preach about how great graphic organizers are. As someone who can sometimes have trouble remembering the steps to different strategies while writing having a graphic organizer is very beneficial. Miss Quinn even mentioned the graphic organizer from my post last week. 

I would really like to hear which strategies you guys liked most.

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