Sixth Grade: Use good writing models for your student to write from.
An extremely strong technique for teaching writing in middle school (and even in high school) is that of having students write from a model for the type of writing you are teaching—and then have the student write that same type originally.
For example, use a passage or source that is a strong report about a president. Have the student write from that report—take notes from it and write the information in his own words. Study that strong report extensively—what each paragraph contained; how the paragraph divisions were created; what kind of information the writer included in it; even what sentence structures and patterns were used. Then have the student write his own report about a president (using all of the elements that the model had)—outlining first, of course!
I started doing this in my books about ten years ago (five years into curriculum writing). I either had them write from a strong report written by another student or by one of our samples writers (as described in the previous paragraph), or at the very least, I started putting samples of strong reports for each project so that teachers and students could see what a final paper looked like for that assignments. (I also use the samples to teach from.)
Save those papers that older siblings or past students have written! Pull them out not to brag or overwhelm the student but to give him a benchmark for what he is supposed to do. I have found that more often than not, when a student sees a model of something that he will be writing, he doesn’t feel threatened. It puts him at ease, and he usually thinks (or even says) I can do this!
Note: I have to mention at this point, though, to be sure that your student doesn’t only write from given source material in the Sentence-by-Sentence—S-by-S (or Key Word Outline) method. He should start (if he hasn’t already) to write from his own research and own ideas too. The S-by-S outlining method is a stepping stone for all types of advanced writing in upper junior high and high school.
Note: Go here to see (and print/use) two week samples of my Meaningful Composition series. These samples have, for the most part, complete writing projects. Thus, you can see sample papers of most projects there. Also, keep your eyes on my stores (Character Ink Store, Teachers Pay Teachers, CurrClick, and Teacher’s Notebook) as I put up various writing project downloads that are in my longer books.
