Must-Teach Writing Skills for the Start of School

Hey, there. I am so glad that you are tuning in today because I am answering a question from a listener that I bet you’ve probably asked yourself.

Now, a few weeks ago, we emailed out a survey to our general teacher audience just to get feedback on podcast topics, resources that y’all need, ideas for summer training and things that we can do to help serve you better. And first of all, let me just say thank you to everybody who filled out that survey. Your responses are so helpful. And they definitely gave me ideas for a lot of podcast episodes like this one specifically.

And I’m sure it’s probably no surprise to you that so many teachers on this survey said that one area that they would love to hear more about is how to teach writing. And one teacher asked a question that I loved and I was like, this is perfect. I’m going to turn this into a podcast episode today.

Her comment slash question was, I hate writing. So I put it off as long as possible. When August comes around, where should I start first? And I could totally relate to that teacher, I feel like I was that teacher when I was in the classroom. And I know I’ve shared this before, but I was not a good writing teacher, the first half of my teaching career.

I was very similar to this teacher, someone who would put writing off for as long as possible, I would try to put it at the end of the day and hope that we ran out of time, I would, you know, skip it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then would you know, do a little something with writing on Thursday and Friday, just to say that I did something related to writing. But I was not a good writing teacher. And I avoided it at all costs.

And I think that’s ultimately, you know, when I think back on it, it’s because I didn’t really know how to teach writing. And I especially did not know how to support my struggling writers. So if you can relate to this question, if you too feel like writing is something that you put off for as long as possible, but you want next year to be different and you’re already thinking ahead to August, and you want a plan to help you make sure that you are setting yourself and your students up for writing and success, then I am going to give you some suggestions in this episode.

But before I share that, because I’ve got three things that I think are great to focus on at the start of the year. And before I share those three specific things, I do need to ask you to make a mindset shift when it comes to your writing instruction. That’s because what I’m going to share with you is really only going to work if you can agree to do one thing. And that really involves how you think about writing.

So ultimately, you need to stop worrying about the end of the year, you need to stop thinking about the expectations that are on your end of year test, you need to stop worrying about how long an essay your students need to write, you need to stop worrying about how quickly you need to get through all of your standards. And really, the sort of mentality that we need to take when it comes to writing instruction is that we need to slow it down.

You know, there’s that common phrase slow down to speed up. And I think it is so true with our writing instruction. And that’s really because an upper elementary, we do get all consumed with what we want our students to master by the end of the year. And oftentimes, it’s because we have that standardized tests that I think just ruins so many things. But that forces us to teach writing at a faster pace than our students are often prepared to handle.

And so if we want to enjoy writing instruction, and if we want our students to enjoy writing instruction, and I think most importantly, if we want our students to become stronger writers, then we have to slow down our writing instruction and really give our students exactly what they need to progress as writers as opposed to rushing through our writing instruction because of what they’re going to be tested on at the end of the year.

So if you can make that mindset shift, and then put in place the three things that I’m going to share with you, I think that you’re going to enjoy teaching writing so much more next year. So let me share with you my thoughts on where you should start your writing instruction when you return to school in August.

The very first thing that I want you to do is to think about how you can introduce your students to the building blocks of writing. So I think like one of the very first things you want to teach your students is that there are these building blocks of writing that help make up the foundation of all writing.

And I’m pretty sure that I’ve talked about these on the podcast before. I know for sure I’ve talked about them on our private podcast, the Confident Writer System Series, which if you have not listened to that series, you can still sign up for it at stellarteacher.com/writingpodcast. It’s free. And it’s kind of like a crash course on how to teach writing in upper elementary.

But in order for our students to be able to become strong writers, they need to understand how writing works like they need to understand how do we get to the essays and the books that we ultimately read.

So this means that our students need to understand things like words have meaning, but they also have function. And all of our writing starts with words. Our students need to understand things like some words, tell us who or what some words tell us when some words tell us what action is happening. And we want our students to understand that every single word has a meaning, but it also has a function within a sentence.

Then we want our students to understand the idea of phrases, we want them to understand that you can combine two or more words, to create a phrase. And a phrase is simply a group of words that can give us more details and information about something compared to just a single word. So it’s a way to, you know, communicate more ideas, more details.

So instead of just having a noun like dog, a writer might include a noun phrase that includes additional words, to give us more information about the dog. The brown fluffy dog is an example of a phrase, or a writer might include things like a prepositional phrase to give us more information about when or where. So they might include phrases like around the corner or under the table. And again, we want our students to understand that you can group words together that have a similar function to create a phrase.

Then the next thing we want our students to know is that when we combine words and phrases, we can form a clause. And we want our students to know that there are two different types of clauses, there is a dependent clause and an independent clause. We want them to know that all clauses have a subject and a predicate. And that every single sentence has to have at least one independent clause.

And I actually think when our students start to understand clauses, they actually begin to understand sentences a whole lot more. Because when students have a strong understanding of clauses, it’s going to be much easier for them to write simple, complex and compound sentences. Like I said, because every single sentence has to have at least one independent clause.

So after our students have this understanding of clauses, then we can teach them about sentences that clauses can be combined to form sentences. And we want our students to know that there are a variety of sentence types, questions, command, statements, exclamations, we also want them to know that there are a variety of sentence structures, simple, complex compound, and we want our students to be able to recognize when a sentence is complete, or incomplete.

And then finally, once our students understand word phrases, clauses and sentences, we want them to know that all of the texts, whether it’s a paragraph, an article or an essay, they’re made up of sentences. You know, we want our students to understand that there is a variety of ways that sentences can be combined and organized, depending on the type of writing and the purpose of writing that an author is choosing.

And you know, when you get to this point, and introducing the building blocks of writing, you could easily introduce your students to different genres of writing, or different organizational styles within writing.

But I think it’s important to go through this progression of the building blocks of writing, because when we start at the very beginning, and we work our way up going from words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and texts, all of the sudden, writing does not seem as complicated to our students, because all we are doing is taking a bunch of words and we are being strategic about how we combine them, and use them so that way we can communicate meaning.

So the very first thing I want you to think about when you return to school is how are you going to introduce and teach your students to these building blocks of writing. Now, I said introduce, that doesn’t mean that your students are going to master and understand. And within the first couple of weeks, they’re going to be pros at all of these things. But they need to have an understanding of how writing works. So that way, when you spend more time later on in the air with sentences and writing texts that they understand how did we get to that point.

So once you’ve introduced the building blocks of writing, the next thing that I think is really important to focus on is sentence writing. And I’ve talked about this before, so this should not be a shocker to you guys. I think way too often, we are so quick to jump into having our students write essays. You know, I did this when I first started when I taught fourth grade even so this was not even when I first started teaching, but when I taught fourth grade, you know, it’d be the first or second week of school and we’re jumping right into essay writing.

But we forget that in order for our students to write an essay as they need to be able to write sentences really, really well. And you know, sentence writing is absolutely essential. And I know that I’ve shared this quote before from the writing revolution. But in that text, they say that if a writer can’t compose a decent sentence, then they will never produce a decent essay, or even a decent paragraph.

And so really, if we want our students to be successful writers, we need to slow down our instruction. And we actually need to spend our writing time teaching our students about sentence writing.

So, you know, we want to think about what does that actually look like? There are a lot of ways that you can focus on sentence writing in your classroom, I think that’s the great thing about sentence level instruction is that because so much of our so much of our writing is composed of sentences, you have opportunities all throughout the day that are going to help your students become stronger sentence writers.

But I think one of the things that we need to be very clear on is that in order for our students to become stronger sentence writers, they have to actually be writing sentences. And I think sometimes it can be tempting to use things like grammar worksheets to practice sentence writing.

But when students are completing a grammar worksheet, they’re doing things like they’re underlining sentences, and they’re labeling sentences and they’re finding the subject in a sentence and a predicate in a sentence. But rarely, are they the ones that are actually doing the writing where they’re actually putting together a sentence. So we need our students to be actually writing sentences in order for them to improve with sentence writing.

But on top of that, it’s not enough necessarily to just have our students write sentences, they need to be able to build their knowledge and understanding of syntax, which is the rules for how we organize words to form a sentence. So we have to actually teach them these rules. And we actually have to put, you know, activities in place and structures that when our students are writing, we can help increase their syntactical knowledge.

So one of the things that you could do, and this is something that we’ve put together, it is probably one of our most popular resources that we share with teachers, but we have a weekly sentence writing routine, and has five different sentence writing activities. So every day students are completing a different sentence writing an activity. So they’re getting practice writing, but also, because of the different activities, they’re developing their understanding of how words work together to form a sentence.

So for example, one of the activities is to have students unscramble a sentence. So they have all of the words that are in the sentence, but they’re mixed up. So students need to unscramble them and figure out how can they put the words in an order that is going to make sense.

And this is a great activity because the students are doing the ones writing the sentence, but we’re giving them all of the sort of necessary ingredients. And they really have to think about okay, like, where are the nouns? Like how can these go together or, you know, what’s the verb, what’s the main noun, what’s the main verb are there extra phrases? And it helps them really understand how words work together to form a sentence.

Another activity in this routine is sentence combining. And again, this is a great way to help students build their syntactical understanding. And with sentence combining, we give students two or three sentences, and they have to figure out how to combine the ideas into one clear sentence.

So this task might require students to take two simple sentences and combined them into a compound sentence. But that’s not always the right way to combine a sentence. And sometimes students will end up taking the two sentences, and writing a simple sentence that has a compound subject or a compound predicate. So again, this act of combining sentences is going to really help students understand sentence structure, the different ways that sentences can be organized, and how to put ideas together so that it makes sense.

So those are just two examples of the sentence writing activities that are in this routine. You know, like I said, this routine is great, because it’s the same five sentence writing activities each week. So students become very familiar with it. And one of the members inside the Stellar Literacy Collective shared how she consistently use this routine with our students last year. And after just six weeks of using this routine, her students improved their revising and editing scores by 15%, which I think is pretty substantial for just six weeks of a sentence writing practice.

So sentence writing is absolutely something that you need to focus on with your students. And that might mean that for a few weeks, maybe a month, it’s hard to tell because I have no idea where your students are going to be at. But this might mean that for a portion of the year, your writing block is only going to focus on sentence writing. And your students are not writing an essay, they’re not doing any longer forms of writing, you are simply helping them build their ability to write sentences and that is completely okay.

Because if your students can master this very important building block of writing, then the other stuff like paragraph writing and essays is eventually going to come so much faster to them. So sentence writing is something that we do not want to skip over. It is something that we want to put a lot of time and attention into because it is, you know, one of the main building blocks of writing that all other writing comes from.

So eventually though, we’re not going to just have our students only focus on sentence writing, eventually that we do want to help support them in understanding how to write paragraphs and longer forms of writing. Again, I don’t want to put a timeframe on it, because every class is different. But at some point, you want to introduce your students to paragraph writing.

And again, notice we’re not jumping right into essay writing. And that’s because before students can write an essay or anything longer, we need to slow down and teach them how to organize multiple sentences into a paragraph.

You know, this means that our students need to have a really clear understanding of what a paragraph is, they need to understand the basic structure of a paragraph, you know that most paragraphs are gonna have a topic sentence, three to five details, a concluding sentence. They need to know how to create an outline for a paragraph, they need to understand how to use different transition words in a paragraph, they need to understand how to revise and edit a paragraph.

And again, I think this is a step that we are quick to gloss over. I know I didn’t focus a lot on paragraph writing when I was in the classroom. And that’s because I was so focused on this end goal. And the result, which was to get my students to write a five paragraph essay, because that is what my state required that I thought, Okay, we have to jump in and start working on essays from the beginning, because my students needs so much time and practice with writing essays.

But I forgot to pay attention to what my students actually needed. And I think had I slow down and actually focused on sentence writing, actually focused on helping them develop just single paragraphs, once we got to essay writing, it would have gone so much faster.

So one of my favorite ways that we support teachers and helping their students understand how to write a solid paragraph is with our paragraph writing routine. And so while this year long resource is really only available inside the Stellar Literacy Collective, we do have a sample resource that you can check out at stellarteacher.com/paragraph.

And basically, this routine takes students through the process of writing a paragraph throughout the course of one week. So we’re not trying to get a paragraph done in a day or multiple paragraphs done in a day, we are really slowing down. And students are just completing one small writing task a day. So it’s never overwhelming for them. But at the end of the week, they’ve gone through the entire writing process, and they have a really strong paragraph.

So a quick overview of this routine, because you can always do something similar with your students. Monday, they’re going to brainstorm and outline their paragraph outlining is very important. Tuesday, they’re going to write their topic or lead sentence. Wednesday, they’re going to draft three to five details. Thursday, they’re going to write a concluding sentence. And then Friday, they’re going to revise and edit.

And teachers love this routine. Because it doesn’t take a ton of instructional time, yet students are making progress. And after using this routine with her students, again, one of our members shared that she noticed clear improvements and overall her students writing grades and test scores improved.

But students also love this routine, because it really breaks down writing into manageable bite sized chunks. So they’re able to develop confidence, because they’re never overwhelmed with a massive writing task. Because every day they’re simply writing one or two sentences, but throughout the week, they’re understanding how these one or two sentences when combined strategically, helps them create a cohesive paragraph.

So again, to answer the question of what should we focus on in writing when we return to school in August, my suggestions are, start with making your students understand the building blocks of writing, spend time helping your students develop their sentence writing skills, and teach your students how to organize sentences into paragraphs.

And maybe most importantly, don’t worry about that end of year test or any end of year expectation. You know, especially don’t put that pressure on your students to start essay writing at the start of the year. You know, I think they’re really going to enjoy writing so much more if you give them instruction and support exactly where they’re at.

And of course, if you are looking for resources to help you with your writing instruction next year, we would love to support you inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. Like I mentioned, our paragraph writing routine is only available to our members and it really has quickly become one of their favorite resources.

Doors to our membership are currently closed, but you can add your name to the waitlist at stellarteacher.com/waitlist so that way, you’ll get notified when we do open up doors later this summer. We’ve got some very exciting updates that are coming in. We would love to support you this next year.

So I hope this episode was helpful. I hope that it makes you feel a little bit more excited to tackle writing this next year. And of course, I hope to see you back here next Monday. Until then have a stellar week.