Beginning of the Year Writing Lessons

Before launching writer’s workshop, there are some beginning of the year writing lessons you’ll want to teach first.

Why not start right away?

While you can certainly dive into a workshop model on the first days of school, I like to wait. The very first thing I do is not a lesson, but a preassessment. 

Giving my class a preassessment does two things: allows me to see exactly where their writing skills are and to be a time filler for me to start pulling students to do individual assessments (such as a phonics screener for reading).

What should I teach first?

The next couple of weeks (depending on your students) are filled with basic sentence writing lessons. While I usually don’t teach using prompts, most students will need reminders on how to write a basic sentence.

The first few weeks of the year are a great time to go over lesson expectations using simple paragraph writing prompts. Showing students a variety of paragraph structures will help them feel successful in writing. I recommend doing only one new structure a week.

Teaching the Basics

During the sentence writing weeks, I am teaching mini lessons about sentence structure and how to use our writing tools. Here are some example mini lessons I might teach:

• What is a sentence

• Sentence punctuation

• Varying our sentence beginnings

• Using the word wall

• Stretching out sounds

• Each word has a vowel

• Words that need capitals

Depending on the levels of my students, these lessons might be repeated later in the year during small groups or 1:1 writing conferences.

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Next Steps

After I feel confident my students can write simple sentences I can begin teaching them the writing process. This is also when I officially launch my writer’s workshop with my expectations and all the components.

What do you teach for the beginning of the year writing lessons?