Creating an Environment to Aid Students in Learning to Write

 

你好- Nǐ hǎo my people!! Welcome back to my blog for yet another fantastic week. I hope my last blog on helping struggling writers tremendously informed you of how to assist these struggling writers within your classroom and that you are now prepared for this week's blog post. <3

How do you create an environment that helps students to learn how to write?

Ensuring that students are within a positive learning environment when they are writing is important in the development of exceptional writers. If a student is unable to write for, they may be having issues with spelling, creating ideas, unable to structure their writing pieces appropriately, may lack understanding of grammar concepts, or struggling with writing overall for their lack of interest. A teacher’s objective is to foster a supportive learning environment for his/her students in the classroom, which would subsequently develop their writing substantially. In achieving this goal, a supportive learning environment should consist of materials to support writing, tools for revising writing, assessments such as rubrics, journals, or portfolios, materials for bookmarking, and encouraging writing activities. 

Writing Materials

Writing Corner 

Materials to Support Writing

Writing practices are just as helpful as writing tools are in and outside the classroom. This is because they allow students to grasp, organize, and integrate past knowledge with new ideas or concepts all while fostering critical thinking about class content. In supporting students’ writing, writing materials do not necessarily have to only be pen, pencil, eraser, paper, and/or as we now are in a technological era a computer or laptop. Materials for supporting your students' writing may come in the form of writers’ notebooks for recording special language that has been heard or read, teacher-made charts, reference materials such as dictionaries, thesauruses, spelling books, electronic spell checkers, and much more. 

Some of these materials to support writing include:

 

Electronic spell checkers

Calendar 

Teacher made Charts

Atlas

Encouraging Writing Activities

What have you gathered from this video? Can you see it being done in your class room?

Other ways we can encourage writing are through fun activities like these below: 

Publishing of students Writing Pieces will be hun

Reading Sessions

Writing plays and Performing them.

Assessment of Writing

 

 

Writing assessments, which can be either summative or formative, are a vital tool in the guidance of both teacher and his/her students. In the sense that the teacher who conducted the assessment or a substitute teacher in their place can read these documents and determine which students would benefit from help. These documents you may ask, include writing portfolios, rubrics, and journals (diaries, learning logs, response journals), In the end, improvements in weak areas, will equate to students becoming exceptional writers, because planning will be directed toward assisting these weak areas. 

Visit these educational websites to learn about easy ways to evaluate pupils' writing:

https://www.landmarkoutreach.org/blog-post/assessing-writing-challenges-and-strategies/

Simple Ways to Assess the Writing Skills of Students with Learning Disabilities | Reading Rockets

Examples of Assessment tools: 

 

Journals 

  

Writing Portfolios 

  

Rubrics

The Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Teacher Training (Caribbean CETT) rubric for scoring writing samples has a four-point scale representing four levels of competency. Seven criteria were created as a result, and they are as follows: elaboration, organization, unity, and coherence; responsiveness to prompt: ideas and development; sentence structure and diversity; grammar, usage, and spelling; punctuation; vocabulary; and presentation and penmanship.

As the teaching of Lit102, come to a close I must say everything I have learned will definitely benefit me as a teacher, not forgetting my colleagues as well and most importantly our students in the future. How bitter-sweet it may be I can say I have accomplished this stage of my life all while educating others about what I myself have been taught which has led me to do other research that has been shown time and time again in each of my blogs. Overall, Lit102 was a great course, thanks to the lecturer who broke it all down for us. 

 Now you have learned a lot from me, learning a lot from LIT102. Overall, what was the best lesson you've grasped within Lit102?