Best practices for Writing
Why Write?
Writing is a life-long literacy skill necessary for functioning as a productive contributing member of today’s society! Writing helps in many ways and allows us to succeed in all aspects of life! Writing helps by making our thinking visible, helps analyze and organize our thoughts, evaluate what we know, and become better readers! |
What do Students Need?
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Writing as a Process
Prewriting: Student generate ideas, organize ideas, and use other strategies before beginning to write!
Drafting: Student narrow the topic and focus on ideas while writing the first draft.
Revising: Students reread, elaborate on ideas, choose precise words and use other strategies to communicate their ideas more effectively.
Editing: Students proofread and check for errors in spelling, capitalization, grammar, and punctuation.
Publishing: Students prepare the final draft and share the draft with classmates and other authentic audiences.
Prewriting: Student generate ideas, organize ideas, and use other strategies before beginning to write!
- Students need to know that planning is essential element to good writing and planning involves idea generation and organizing ideas!
Drafting: Student narrow the topic and focus on ideas while writing the first draft.
- It is important to remember that it is easier to work with ideas or words instead of sentences. Also, students need encouraged with they are experiencing a writer's block.
- As a whole, encourage collaboration and if possible, use class time for drafting time.
Revising: Students reread, elaborate on ideas, choose precise words and use other strategies to communicate their ideas more effectively.
- Revising means working with content, moving ideas around, and elaborating! Revising allows for ideas to be moved around or redundant information to be taken out. Also, peer revision can be used which helps the student revising.
Editing: Students proofread and check for errors in spelling, capitalization, grammar, and punctuation.
- Editing should not be introduced too soon and should not take priority over matters of content. Editing is for the purpose of publishing a final draft!
Publishing: Students prepare the final draft and share the draft with classmates and other authentic audiences.
- Writing needs to have a purpose, especially real-life purposes.
- Also, writing for the teacher is not motivating nor does it produce the best writing.
Teaching Writing
In the classroom it is important to establish a positive atmosphere for writing, reading, and learning! This can be done through having an inviting classroom which is colorful.
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Designing Writing Activities
There are important components that need to be incorporated to encourage students and help them succeed!
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ReadWriteThink is a great resource for teachers. It has a lot of outlets that will help guide teachers in a way their students can be successful.
This link explores integrating writing into the classroom as a content area and how that can happen! It explores different writing activities and different assignments that can be used.