Primary Writing

As I have mentioned before, reading and literacy are passions of mine.  So is writing.  I admit, I get frustrated when I see various writing statistics.  While prepping for a session on writing workshop I was leading at a teachers' conference, I discovered that my local school district had fewer than 20% of students meet or exceed the standard in writing.  While I wish I could track progress since then, the state has gotten rid of the writing assessment portion of the standardized tests.  Now, I know that a standardized test is probably not the most accurate assessment of student writing, but it is the assessment we had.  More and more college students are needing to take a remedial writing class so that they can simply write at a collegiate level.  When I was working on my Master's degree, some of my classes involved critiquing my classmates' papers.  While some were well written, some made me wonder how they managed to even graduate college with their writing skills.  (If you are in a master's program, you should be able to write a thesis statement.)

How do we solve this problem?  Teachers, we NEED to spend time teaching writing in the classroom.  I also believe that we need to teach writing in a variety of different ways.  Because I teach a multi-grade classroom in which I have several mandatory curriculum (one of which is an English curriculum that has a poor writing component), I am not able to do writing workshop every day, although I would love to.  However, I ditch the English twice a week (and skip all of the writing units) for writing workshop.  My writing workshop time consists or three main parts: minilesson, writing/conferencing time, and sharing.  I don't have students share every day because they do not have finished pieces every day, but we do share often.  My minilessons are very focused on what my students need and are based on the Six Traits of writing. Conferencing time with individual students, both formal and informal, is the most valuable part of writing workshop.  While we do work on conventions some, more time is spent on the other 5 traits (ideas, organization, word choice, voice, and sentence fluency).  

In writing workshop, students work on more formal writing.  However, I think it is also important for students to have informal writing opportunities.  As part of my literacy centers, students have journals.  Some days they respond to a prompt and other days they have an opportunity to freewrite about anything they like. The only rule is that they have to write the entire time.  My students love their journals.  They give students a chance to express themselves and simply write.  The best way to develop writers is to let them write.  I don't grade these or conference over these, but I do check them occasionally to make sure students are writing.  I have seen writing proficiency increase greatly with the combination of formal and informal writing.

If you want a copy of my writing journals (which can be edited to meet the needs of your own classroom), click on the picture below:

  

How do you teach writing in your classroom?  What has worked for you?