4 Things to Do If You Don’t Have a Writing Curriculum (or it Doesn’t Meet the Needs of Your Students!)

I feel like this is the summer of answering teacher questions here on the podcast. I feel like every week I say I got this question from a teacher and we’re going to talk about it today. But the reality of it is is I love using this podcast to answer your questions. And I know when I get a question from one teacher, more than likely there are more teachers in my podcast audience that have that exact same question.

And today, we are going to talk about how do you teach writing when you don’t have a curriculum? Or how do you teach writing when the curriculum you’ve been given, doesn’t actually work? And I felt like I have taught in schools that had both of these scenarios I have taught in schools where we literally had no writing curriculum, all we had were the standards. And I felt like my understanding of the standards was pretty weak at the time because I was a newer teacher.

And so I had to figure out on my own how to teach writing, because I didn’t have any resources to do it. And I’ve also been at schools where even though we have a writing curriculum, it did not match up with the needs of my students. I have often found that writing is one of those areas, that if you have students who are struggling writers, most boxed curriculums or programs you’re given aren’t going to actually meet the needs of your students because the curriculum is designed for on level or advanced writers.

And so how do we meet the needs of our students, when the curriculum we’re being given doesn’t actually work? So on the podcast today, I want to share four things that you can do, if you feel like you are starting from scratch when it comes to teaching writing. Or if you feel like you have to come up with your own writing plan, because the resources you’ve been given aren’t going to work for your students.

So the first thing that I would encourage you to do is to incorporate routines into your writing block. And there are really two routines that I think are pretty important for upper elementary. And those are a sentence writing routine and a paragraph writing routine. And I’m going to explain both of those in a little bit here.

But when you incorporate routines, it’s going to help your students understand the flow of your writing block. But it’s also going to make it easier for you to plan and prepare for an effective writing block, it’s gonna make it easier for you to plan because you know, okay, we start with our sentence writing routine. And then we jump into our paragraph writing routine, you’re not going to have to come up with specific content, you just have to execute the routine every single day and every single week.

So like I said, there’s really two routines that I think are great for upper elementary, and they’re especially great if you have students who struggle with writing complete sentences or struggle with writing in general. And so a sentence writing routine, I think, is really important. Even if you have students that can write complete sentence, the reality of it is is sentence writing is the backbone and the foundation of all future writing.

And so we want our students to continuously improve this specific skill. And I think sometimes when kids get to us in upper elementary, we assume they know how to write sentences. So this is not something that we need to develop. But we absolutely do need to develop it because we want their sentences to be super detailed, we want them to be varied, we want them to be well written. And that only happens with intentional practice.

So a sentence writing routine. what this could look like on a practical level, is spend the first five minutes of your writing block and kind of treat it like a warm up to your writing lesson. And every day you can focus on a different sentence writing activity. And this is going to help students develop their writing confidence as well as strengthen their sentence writing skills.

And you could do you know, for an entire week, you could do the same sentence writing activity and switch it up. You know, every week do something different or every day of the week, you could do the same activity. Like every Monday you do expanding a sentence every Tuesday you do writing four different sentences every Wednesday, you find and fix a fragment every Thursday, you combine sentences and every Friday, you unscramble a sentence.

And those are just five different sentence writing activities that you could use There are plenty more. But if you want to learn more about those specific activities, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to episode number 101, where I actually break down our very popular sentence writing routine and explain all of the activities in there.

But a sentence writing routine, I think is essential for an upper elementary classroom, because like I said, even if students can write complete sentences, they probably aren’t to the level or to the quality that you want them to be or that they could be. And so we want to give students intentional practice with sentence writing.

The second routine that I would encourage you to put in place in your writing block is a paragraph writing routine. And for similar reasons, you know, when students start to write longer essays, or you know, research papers, or whatever it is, they’re going to have multiple paragraphs in their writing. And oftentimes, students don’t really understand how to develop a paragraph.

And so if we can give them support with these foundational skills, they’re going to become much stronger writers later on in the year. So a paragraph writing routine could be a weekly routine. And each day of the week, your students are going to focus on one small part of writing a paragraph.

So Monday, they might brainstorm and outline their paragraph on Tuesday, they might spend time developing their topic sentence for the paragraph. On Wednesday, they’re going to draft their details. On Thursday, they’re going to either write their concluding sentence, or maybe they jump into revising and editing. And then on Friday, they can publish which is optional, or if they need to continue revising and editing, that’s an option, but they’re going to go through those steps.

And every week, they’re going to repeat the same steps for a different paragraph. And eventually, as the year goes on, they’re going to become much more automatic and proficient with it to where they probably can do these five steps in a single setting. But they’re going to really understand the process of how to write a strong paragraph.

And I really love using this paragraph writing routine at the start of the year, because it’s going to force you to slow down the writing process. And I think too often, especially in upper elementary, we put the demand or the expectation of having students to write a long five paragraph essay on them way before they’re ready to do it.

So you know, from the very beginning of the year, like in fourth or fifth grade, we want students to write this five paragraph essay, and they’re still struggling to write paragraphs. And when we put an expectation that our students aren’t ready to meet, we are basically setting our students up for failure.

You know, if our students don’t have the writing tools, or skills to write a five paragraph essay, then they’re going to lack confidence, they’re going to lack motivation. And really, their self esteem around writing is going to suffer because we are asking them to do something that they are not prepared to do. Which kind of leads me into my next suggestion.

The second thing that you really can do to teach writing, if you don’t have a curriculum is to keep your instruction bite sized and manageable for you and your students. And so many teachers say that they don’t have enough time to teach writing. And I’m going to argue that that is simply not true.

Now, maybe you don’t have enough time for your students to write independently for 20 minutes a day, I would believe that. Or maybe you don’t have enough time for your students to write an entire essay every single week, I would believe that. But you definitely have time to teach writing, especially if you keep your writing instruction, bite sized and manageable.

And I actually think that there are a lot of benefits to do that. And one way that you can make sure that your writing instruction is bite sized and manageable for both you and your students is to use the Paragraph Writing routine, and the sentence writing routine that I explained in the first step because both of those break up writing into very small and specific tasks where every day students are doing just one small part so they’re not getting overwhelmed.

And like I said, this is going to benefit your students in a lot of ways. First of all, for your students who struggle with writing, they’re not going to feel as overwhelmed with the expectation of writing. You know, if you tell your students I want you to write independently for 20 minutes, that’s really overwhelming for a student who struggles with writing. Or if you tell your students that they need to draft out an entire five paragraph essay, that is also overwhelming.

But if you have a student who struggles with writing, and the task for the day is simply to develop their topic sentence that is so much more manageable, and we’re going to give them a win where they’re going to feel confident and successful, and probably more motivated to want to keep writing.

But slowing down our writing instruction and giving students bite sized manageable tasks is also going to help your students who are already strong writers, because we are going to be giving them the opportunity to really focus on quality over quantity.

So students can really refine their writing skills and play around with word choice and sentence structure and they can spend time considering the details you know, because rather than telling them you need to write an entire essay today we’re saying no, you get to spend time actually developing and thinking about your topic sentence, and making it really, really strong.

So we are going to be giving additional whitespace to the students who are already strong writers. And that’s going to help them, you know, with their creativity, and with really enhancing the quality of their writing. But slowing down your writing instruction to bite sized manageable chunks is also beneficial for you. Because it’s gonna make it a lot easier for you to plan.

You’re not having to plan this super long in depth lesson, you are simply tackling one small part with your students, which means it’s less examples for you to put together, it’s less content for you to teach. And it’s going to take much less time, so you can easily squeeze it in.

And here’s the other benefit. When you spend so much explicit time focusing just on Paragraph Writing at the start of the year, when you eventually do move to essay development later in the year, your students are going to be ready, which means they’re going to be much more likely to succeed and move quickly through essay writing, because you didn’t give them too much before they were ready. So really slowing down your instruction and keeping it bite sized and manageable is going to be a win win for both you and your students.

The third thing that you can do if you do not have a writing curriculum is write about your content. And I think this is really great, because it’s going to make writing much more purposeful for your students. I think writing can often seem like a challenge for students because they don’t know what to write about. And we think that they should, right, it’s like they have, you know, so many stories to tell.

But the idea of having to come up with a story, or take an experience and actually write about it is very difficult for our students. But when you have students write about the content they’re learning, it removes one of the hurdles. Students can focus more of their time and energy on actual writing, rather than trying to remember the details of their vacation to Disney or their 10th birthday party.

And when you write about your content, it’s a great way to incorporate cross curricular instruction, which just brings a whole new level of purpose and meaning to what you are teaching. I mean, there’s so many different ways to bring in your content to your writing.

And so some examples of different writing prompts that you could use to connect what you’re learning in other subjects to your specific writing objectives is you could help your students summarize a story and your writing lessons for a week help your students really develop a paragraph that summarizes a story that you read.

You could have students write about the characteristics of being a good teammate in gym class. And so they have to reflect on what they’re doing in gym and the importance of being a good teammate. And they could write an expository paragraph that explains, you know, characteristics of someone who’s a good teammate.

You could have them describe an ecosystem. So again, they’re connecting writing to science class, and for an entire week, they’re going to work on a paragraph that really describes an ecosystem that they’ve learned about. Or you could have them write about the events of some historical event that you are reading.

And so again, these are going to be your sort of weekly or maybe this is going to take two weeks, however long you want to pace it out. But you’re going to spend time during your actual writing block helping your students write about these specific prompts. But the content that your students are going to be using for their inspiration comes from other parts of your instructional day.

So again, it’s really helpful because students don’t have to think about what do I want to write about because they are learning about it in other classes, and so it’s going to be easy for them to bring that information in to complete their writing assignment.

The fourth thing that you can do if you don’t have a writing curriculum is to make sure that you keep the focus on the writing process, and not isolated grammar skills. And I personally think we put too much emphasis on teaching grammar in isolation. We’ve got grammar worksheets, we give our students quizzes, they’ve got revising and editing tests they need to take.

But teaching grammar in isolation can take up a lot of time in our writing block. And the reality of it is is it doesn’t always work. We can teach grammar in isolation and a student can be successful with a grammar worksheet, but they can’t apply those same grammar skills to their actual writing.

So while grammar is important, it is not the main event of our writing block. You know if students can repeat all sorts of grammar rules and ace grammar worksheets, but they can’t actually write a complete sentence or compose a strong paragraph, then teaching them all those grammar rules and skills is really a waste of our time. So if you don’t have a writing curriculum, just make sure that you are keeping the bulk of your writing time focused on walking students through the writing process and engaged in actual writing.

And the Paragraph Writing routine that I mentioned in the first step can really serve as a good backbone of your writing instruction. It guides students through the writing process, but it also gives you opportunities to address key grammar skills through bite sized lessons you are teaching.

For example, you can address different sentence types and sentence structure when you are covering topic sentences. And you can address complete sentences along with capitalization and punctuation when your students start drafting their outline. And you can also talk about parts of speech and transition words when students start revising and editing.

So you can easily address grammar skills within your instruction. But we want to make sure that we keep the bulk of our time and energy focused on helping students actually write.

So those are the four things that I would encourage you to do. But there’s actually one more thing that I would encourage you to consider. And that is to consider joining us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. This is our membership site for third, fourth and fifth grade teachers.

And the reason why I mentioned it is sort of twofold. One of the things that we are adding this year to the membership is a whole set of writing resources, specifically, Paragraph Writing routines, and lessons and student materials that you can use with your students. And really, we want to make it easy for teachers just like you to teach effective writing lessons to their students, which is why we put together this paragraph writing routine.

So whether you have a writing curriculum that isn’t working, or if you don’t have a writing curriculum at all the resources that we are sharing with our members will help you become a more writing teacher. Like I mentioned, we’re adding in this paragraph writing routine. And we have a sentence writing routine that our teachers absolutely love. And both of these resources will make it really easy for you to build a strong writing foundation for your students.

But in addition to having access to the resources that you need, you also get access to a community of like minded teachers who wants to increase their effectiveness. And they want to provide engaging and rigorous lessons for their students. And they want to help their students develop the key literacy skills needed to be successful in the world.

And I think it’s so important to surround ourselves with other people and teachers who want the same things that we want. And I know that you care about being a good teacher, because you listen to this podcast every single week. And I would love to have you be a part of this community as well, and surround yourself with like minded teachers.

But the other really great benefit is that our membership site also includes pretty much everything you need to teach writing as well. So you get access to all of our new writing resources that we’re adding. But you also get access to things like Word Study lessons and vocabulary routines and whole group comprehension lessons in small group lessons. And we really have so much in there. Our goal with our membership site is to make it your one stop shop for teaching reading and writing in upper elementary.

And the reason why I bring it up today is because our membership is not always open for enrollment. And we just opened up the doors for enrollment for the 2023 2024 school year on July 10, which is the day that this episode went live. And so the doors are only going to be open until Friday, July 14th, at midnight.

And so if you are thinking about joining, or if you want access to resources and encouragement and support that is really going to make this next year so much easier for you, then we would love to have you join us inside the community. And I know it’s obviously really easy for me to say, Hey, I think the membership would be a really great fit for you come and join us. But the members who are part of our community also think that this would be a good fit for you.

And so some of the things that our members have recently shared with us in the last couple of months. Janine said that the membership has allowed me to spend more time with my family. Instead of spending hours finding or making quality instructional materials, I’ve been able to deliver content with consistency and quality.

And Rachel shared with me, I love how I no longer have to search for resources, they are at my fingertips. Everything is seamless, and easy to access. The rigor is great for my fifth grade students, and the membership has saved me time, money, and most importantly, my sanity.

And finally, Kaylee said our school doesn’t have a curriculum, so we solely rely on the standards. And this membership has given me the tools and resources to feel competent in teaching the standards, and challenging students every day in the classroom. From the puzzles to the task cards, my students have enjoyed it all, I would highly recommend it to anyone.

So if you want to experience some of these wins and other wins, then you can enroll in the membership or simply learn more by going to stellarteacher.com/join. And we’ll leave the link to that in the show notes as well.

Like I said, I know how hard it is to teach writing without a curriculum or with resources that aren’t actually supporting your students needs, which is why we are adding in writing to the membership this year. But in addition to considering the Stellar Literacy Collective, let me remind you of the four things that you can do to teach writing, even if you don’t have a curriculum. The membership would be bonus but there are still things that you can do.

One incorporate routines into your writing block. Two keep your instruction bite sized and manageable for your students. Three write about your content. And four keep the focus on teaching the writing process not isolated grammar skills. I truly hope to connect with you inside the Stellar Literacy Collective this year. But if not, I hope to see you back here next Monday. Have a stellar week.