- Wednesday 19 June 2019
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Helping your students learn how to write with a great start
According to the New Zealand Curriculum writing standards, students are expected to be able to use their writing to think about, record and communicate experiences, ideas and information to meet specific learning purposes.
After completing Year 1, students should be able to:
- plan what they want to write by talking, drawing or potentially writing word ideas.
- write about their experiences and ideas, and provide information.
- link their story to things they've experienced.
- use words that they recognise from their reading or listening.
So how can we best help them achieve this? It all starts with a strong strategy and a clear understanding of the factors that affect their development.
It is important to begin by finding students' existing capability at the beginning of the school year. Understanding their strengths, experiences, knowledge and skills will determine how you can strategise to help each student learn. For example, some students might come in already with the knowledge of how to read and write, while some might not even have English as their first language.
Make sure you record the results of this initial assessment, so you can track each student's progress throughout the year, and as each new concept and activity is introduced. The literacy learning progressions document is a great place to understand the signposts that you need to follow, and you can even break this down further into half-yearly or quarterly expectations.
Importance of oral language in writing
What is oral language, and why is it important to the development of literacy skills? Oral language is the way we use spoken words to express knowledge, feelings and ideas. It’s considered to be the gateway for knowledge acquisition in both reading and writing. Simply put, students need to be able to discuss what they want to write before putting anything on paper.
To cultivate students’ oral language skills, you should provide plenty of opportunities to talk before, during and after writing. This is especially true for younger students, where the only opportunity for them to plan out their writing is by orally rehearsing their ideas, or potentially drawing them out.
The following are some of the things you should focus on when discussing with students:
- Talk about who they’re writing for and why.
- Introduce key words related to the topic or task, expanding their vocabulary through the process.
- Remind them of previous concepts taught and provide a link on how they relate to the current task.
- After the task, prompt students to reflect and think critically of their writing.
These discussions can be had in many formats to encourage students to share their ideas, opinions and experiences. Whether it’s group discussions, sharing circles or partner work, keep your students talking and thinking about writing before, during and after the task.
One of the ways you can help students develop and build their oral language abilities is by running interactive and fun activities around different themes. As these skills develop, it will become easier for your students to plan out and enrich their writing.
Key strategies to teach writing
One of the first things you can look at when teaching strategies for writing is word choice. This refers to the student’s selection of the words they use to express their ideas and communicate their intentions accurately. For beginner writers, this means working at the sentence level and paying attention to the correct usage of nouns, pronouns, verbs and more. Here’s a quick example of an activity around verb tense that you can try in the classroom. Extract from Teaching Strategies for Writing Book A, pages 22 & 23.
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The next area of interest for writing is sentence structure. It is important to understand that good writers improve by planning out their sentences and paragraphs in advance. Start by explaining and demonstrating what a sentence is: a set of words that makes sense by itself. It can be a statement, a question, an exclamation or a command. Here’s another activity example around sentences for you to try with your class. Extract from Teaching Strategies for Writing Book A, pages 32 & 33.
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The third focus area in developing good writers is punctuation. Punctuation is there to provide a way for writers to express intonation in their writing. By utilising a period, a comma, an exclamation point or a question mark, a writer gives out signals to the reader on when to pause, stop, or look into a point with more attention. Here’s an activity that showcases how correct punctuation adds clarity and precision to writing. Extract from Teaching Strategies for Writing Book A, pages 66 & 67.
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The last focus area in helping beginner writers on their way is editing and proofreading. Editing involves tidying up the work to improve the readability of the text. This mainly involves adding or removing texts and ensuring that your ideas flow logically from start to finish. Proofreading involves checking for correct spelling and grammar. Here’s an activity that can help beginner writers with editing and proofreading. Extract from Teaching Strategies for Writing Book A, pages 94 to 97.
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Potential problems and how to solve them
Even with the best plan and structure in place, some students will still find difficulties and struggle with certain aspects of writing. This is why it is important to have good documentation on the prior knowledge that students have, how far along they are after your first check-in (potentially after 6 months) and where they end up at the end of the year.
Here are a couple of common challenges and strategies to overcome them:
A student is having trouble forming the letters as intended.
Start looking into the root cause of this issue. Is it a fine motor skills problem where the particular student hasn't developed the skills required to hold their writing tool correctly? Or is it related to their inability to form specific letters? Looking at their writing examples and how their skills are progressing in other learning areas should provide ample clues to determine how to help the student.
Some ideas include:
- Provide activities that are designed to improve fine motor skills.
- Provide other mediums in which students can form letters.
- Provide instructions and exercises specific to the formation of trouble letters
A student doesn’t know what to write.
There are many cases of a student struggling with what to write. One of the potential causes is that they are having difficulty generating and retaining ideas. This usually stems from not having enough oral language skills to express their stories.
Ways to help include:
- spending more time developing what the student wants to write by engaging them in a discussion on what their thoughts about the topic. You can guide this discussion further by providing prompts.
- asking them to focus on a simple idea, and once that forms into a story, having them to re-tell it to a peer or yourself.
- getting in touch with the student's parents and finding out what the student is most interested in. You can then use this to tailor the writing exercise based on a topic that they are interested in.
As you work through these issues with your students, you will find that each child is different in their pace of development, and there are many opportunities for you to differentiate the tasks and exercises that you provide to help them develop. Providing these students with a tool-kit on how they can improve can go a long way in ensuring that their writing becomes better over time.
Need some further guidance in developing your beginner writers? Our bestselling six-book series, Teaching strategies for writing, uses modelling, guided and independent practice to teach students strategies they can use to improve clarity, correctness and richness of their writing. As we aim to help teachers and schools in New Zealand meet the reading and writing demands of the curriculum, you will find that this resource is easy to use and effective in helping your students. Check out the series in more detail here or reach out to us if you need help in a particular area of teaching.