Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Writing Tips in the Elementary Classroom


Hello and welcome to my blog. I am an elementary school teacher and a writer. The experience of writing novels has sharpened my skills in the teaching of writing. My students consistently produce stellar writing pieces. In this blog I am going to share ideas, tips, and lessons that you might find helpful. My focus will be the teaching of creative writing in the elementary classroom.

Two years ago I described in detail my weekly writing lessons in a blog. In the new academic year I plan to reproduce these blog entries, but in an expanded form. Please go to emoodley.blogspot.com to view these lessons which were taught to a class of third grade students in California.

It’s important to be aware that writing narrative pieces is a difficult skill. Many adults are reluctant writers, and when they do have to produce a piece of writing it’s usually done with a lot of effort. To create strong, enthusiastic writers you need the right classroom climate. Here’s a list of tips worth keeping in mind:

1. Choose exciting topics

You know that wild enthusiasm you see in kids when you mention certain topics? If you give students a topic that they want to write about, well, they are certainly going to deliver. Don’t get hung up on choosing topics that are related to their content curriculum areas when the focus is creative writing. This is the time for the kids to use their imagination. Often kids don’t find themselves in contexts to express new knowledge. Creative writing provides that opportunity, and allows for experimentation of newly acquired vocabulary.

2. Talk it up.

When you introduce a new writing task, present it with all the enthusiasm you can muster. Build up a variety of ideas using books, video clips, samples from past years, etc.

3. Understand your goals for this specific writing task

Are you looking for a beginning, middle, end? Are you looking for strong paragraphs with a topic sentence and supporting sentences? Are you looking for character descriptions? Do you have multiple goals? Ensure that the students know how to attain the goals you have set.

4. Provide guidance

Remember that writing isn’t easy. In the elementary grades students need to be guided through the basics of writing (paragraphing, characterization, plotting) each time you assign a new task. Obviously you’ll spend a decreasing amount of time on these skills as the year progresses.

5. Keep it simple

Demanding at the outset that the piece you have just assigned should contain everything you feel makes writing strong can be intimidating.  As a writer myself, I know that when I have to do a huge project my work quality plummets. But if a task is broken up into little parts, it becomes so much easier to give each small part the attention it deserves. Approach an assignment in steps, or layers. Break it up into a series of lessons.

6. Glaring mistakes

Don’t get hung up on glaring mistakes, such as a paragraph that isn’t indented. Editorial mistakes are easy to fix. Focus on the artistic aspects of the story. Nothing can be more discouraging to a creative child than a teacher noticing his/her punctuation rather that his/her original ideas! It takes a lot of effort to come up with an exciting plot, to create unusual characters, and to pull the reader into a vivid setting. Punctuation, capitalization, and grammar, while important, fall into a different skill set. These can be fixed later, after the distilling of ideas.