This is my first official week of summer break, and I am beyond excited to finally delete all my alarms and sleep in for a change.
Of course, sleeping in for me means I’m still up between 6 a.m. – 7 a.m., but I’ll take it.
So what have I done so far?
I’ve added 3 new resources to my TpT store, started an Instagram account and this blog, and obsessed over my just-released state test scores.
Oh, and yesterday I met up with a teacher friend of mine at Starbucks to chat about teaching and writing. More specifically rethinking how we teach writing and grammar in our upper elementary classrooms.
This is a topic that comes up frequently during my PD sessions. Teachers often ask:
“How do I find time to teach writing?” or “How often should my students write?”
When pressed for more info, I usually find out that most teachers in my workshops devote 30 minutes of writing time or less per week. Writing just seems to get crowded out of an already busy schedule.
I can’t remember where I saw this, but I once read that our elementary students need 1 hour of dedicated writing time . . . PER DAY. Not per week, but per day.
In the Scholastic blog post linked below, literacy advocate and founder of LitWorld, Pam Allyn advocates for at least 30 minutes of writing instruction a day and says . . .
“Reading is like breathing in;
Pam Allyn
Writing is like breathing out.”
She’s not wrong.
If we want our students to become better writers, they have to . . . WRITE MORE.
And I don’t mean long, drawn out process writing pieces either. Students of all ages need to see writing as a way to process and reflect on their life experiences and texts read. Writing is how they make sense of their world. Writing is how they will CHANGE their world.
So how do we make space in our day for more writing? By creating a writing-centric classroom.
When you start planning out a new curricular unit, ask yourself the following questions:
- What will we do (write) with the knowledge we gain from this unit of study?
- Who will we share that knowledge with?
Look for opportunities throughout the day for kids to write in short bursts. A quickwrite activity can help students activate prior knowledge or summarize new information learned. A quickwrite can also be used to practice new vocabulary and spelling words.
For every text you read, steal 20 rich words and add them to an ongoing word bank.
While students read a text, have them take notes and interact and connect with the text in writing. Sentence stems like . . .
- This reminds me of a text I read . . .
- What does the author mean when she says . . .
- This reminds me of a time when . . .
Return to a text you’ve just read, but this time, don’t read like a reader does. Go deeper and read like a writer. In other words, what can this author teach you about how to write effectively?
- How does this author create a strong introduction?
- How does the author use figurative language or repetition?
- How did the author establish the time period? Or conflict? Or setting?
- How did the author conclude their writing?
Look deeper still and focus on grammatical structures. Can you pull out a mentor sentence and have your students analyze and mimic it? Can you gamify your grammar practice? Can you turn it into a competition?
The Writing-Centric classroom flips the script and turns close reading time into close writing time. Every text you read is a mentor text waiting to teach you something. All you have to do is pay attention.
The graphic above shows how reading and writing are intertwined throughout the writing process.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. The more the students write, the more you have to grade, right?
Wrong!
Put down that red pen. Don’t edit or grade anything. Like at all.
Our goal is to offer students multiple, low-stakes opportunities to write. Not every writing piece needs to go through the whole writing process. And that’s okay!
Think of these short writing bursts like practice. And practice doesn’t belong in our grade book, right? More on that topic next time.
If you’re looking for unit planning resources, you might like these:
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