by Donna | Oct 13, 2015
Third Grade: Use a Question and Answer Template to teach this age group how to write a paragraph.
One of the biggest obstacles facing young writers is that we often do not teach them how to write. We have writing idea books galore. We study a topic in social studies or literature, and we tell our student to “write about it.” Even when we give a topic (“Write a paragraph about your dog”), a third grade student (okay, third grade boy!) will often say, “I don’t know what to write.”
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by Donna | Oct 5, 2015
Second Grade: Pen for your student for as long as necessary.
Children often think they cannot write because they do not have the penning skills to compose sentences or paragraphs or the spelling skills to spell the words they want to use. Right off the bat, the young child grows to dislike writing. He feels inadequate (and thus, the many “I don’t know how to write” or “I’m bad at writing” mentalities of this age group).
Usually a child’s creativity and thinking processes are way above their small motor and spelling skills. That is, a child can think (and orally compose) way above what he can write (spelling-wise and writing mechanics-wise) or spell (encoding; just because a child can “decode”—sound out words—does not mean he can ‘’encode”—spell the words). This is where penning for your student (especially for dyslexic/dysgraphic ones and/or “late bloomers”) makes the difference between your child seeing himself as a writer or as a student who is “behind.”
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by Donna | Sep 28, 2015
First Grade: Don’t rush “writing” when a child is learning to read.
I haven’t taught first grade in ten years. I have missed teaching a child to read—so much that I have actually considered trying to get some hours at a tutoring center just to be able to teach beginning reading again. (I know; I’m a hopeless romantic when it comes to teaching!)
Notice this tip is in the first grade paragraph—not the kindergarten one. My children learned to read in first or second grade (okay, um, two in third).
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by Donna | Sep 21, 2015
I have loved teaching writing and language arts to nearly a hundred students a year for the past fifteen years (started out with eight students!). Through that process, as well as through writing fifty thousand pages of curricula, books, blog posts, and more over the past fifteen years, I have learned so much about teaching writing—and also about the expectations and goals that we have for students at various levels. Sometimes these expectations are extreme, but sometimes they are not adequate. In this series, I hope to give you an *encouraging* writing tip for each grade level. Keep in mind that I am talking here about the act of writing/creating/composing, not the act of penmanship (or even spelling). Here we go…
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