When it comes to wanting to improve student writing, it really comes down to having our students practice more. But how do we get them to do that when they hate writing or find it boring?
Freewriting
It isn’t often we think about using freewriting for our lower elementary students. I remember having to do freewriting in high school and maybe junior high.
If you’re not familiar with freewriting, it’s a time where you just let students write - about anything and in any style they want. This could mean making a book, writing a letter, making a card, or just writing a story. Fiction or non-fiction doesn’t matter. The idea is just to have students write.
Do you like alliteration? Try Friday freewrites. Every Friday set aside 15-20 minutes to give students time to just write. If students struggle to come up with something to write about, as a class you can brainstorm a list of all the things considered writing that they can pick from.
Writing Across Content Areas
Another way to infuse more writing throughout the day is to build in more writing across content areas. All subjects lend themselves to writing responses. I like to have my students write in math, science, health, reading, and social studies.
During math, ask students to pick a problem and write a few sentences about how they solved the problem. In science, have them write the steps for the scientific process or take notes on how they did an experiment.
Reading there are many ways to encourage more writing including responses about what they just read (or heard). They can write a paragraph about the text to self connection they made to a story.
Social studies, or history, your students can create a timeline of events. They can write a fiction paragraph imagining they are in that place and time. Get creative with it and have fun!
Related Post: Teaching Writing Across Content Areas
Writing Centers
My last suggestion today for getting students to write more in order to improve student writing, is to incorporate writing centers into your center rotations. If you have word centers or phonics centers, you may think you already have writing centers. These are great centers and I would keep them but I would encourage you to add a center where there is a written product.
By this I mean they are producing something that takes longer to write than a word they sounded out. Maybe the center is similar to freewriting and they choose a card that tells them what they will produce that day - a card, comic, letter, story, postcard, book. During the writing center they are working on that product.
One of my favorite writing centers is my letter and card writing. When I was teaching second grade, I would change up the center every month to new themed writing papers, postcards, and cards so students wouldn’t get bored.
It was a hit among the class to be able to choose friends to write to and “mail” their letters or cards to. Best of all, it gave students a real purpose for their writing which in turn made them want to write more. If you’d like to try this center in your class, check out the picture below.
