creative writing strategies for teachers

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Four Strategies for Effective Writing Instruction

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(This is the first post in a two-part series.)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is the single most effective instructional strategy you have used to teach writing?

Teaching and learning good writing can be a challenge to educators and students alike.

The topic is no stranger to this column—you can see many previous related posts at Writing Instruction .

But I don’t think any of us can get too much good instructional advice in this area.

Today, Jenny Vo, Michele Morgan, and Joy Hamm share wisdom gained from their teaching experience.

Before I turn over the column to them, though, I’d like to share my favorite tool(s).

Graphic organizers, including writing frames (which are basically more expansive sentence starters) and writing structures (which function more as guides and less as “fill-in-the-blanks”) are critical elements of my writing instruction.

You can see an example of how I incorporate them in my seven-week story-writing unit and in the adaptations I made in it for concurrent teaching.

You might also be interested in The Best Scaffolded Writing Frames For Students .

Now, to today’s guests:

‘Shared Writing’

Jenny Vo earned her B.A. in English from Rice University and her M.Ed. in educational leadership from Lamar University. She has worked with English-learners during all of her 24 years in education and is currently an ESL ISST in Katy ISD in Katy, Texas. Jenny is the president-elect of TexTESOL IV and works to advocate for all ELs:

The single most effective instructional strategy that I have used to teach writing is shared writing. Shared writing is when the teacher and students write collaboratively. In shared writing, the teacher is the primary holder of the pen, even though the process is a collaborative one. The teacher serves as the scribe, while also questioning and prompting the students.

The students engage in discussions with the teacher and their peers on what should be included in the text. Shared writing can be done with the whole class or as a small-group activity.

There are two reasons why I love using shared writing. One, it is a great opportunity for the teacher to model the structures and functions of different types of writing while also weaving in lessons on spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

It is a perfect activity to do at the beginning of the unit for a new genre. Use shared writing to introduce the students to the purpose of the genre. Model the writing process from beginning to end, taking the students from idea generation to planning to drafting to revising to publishing. As you are writing, make sure you refrain from making errors, as you want your finished product to serve as a high-quality model for the students to refer back to as they write independently.

Another reason why I love using shared writing is that it connects the writing process with oral language. As the students co-construct the writing piece with the teacher, they are orally expressing their ideas and listening to the ideas of their classmates. It gives them the opportunity to practice rehearsing what they are going to say before it is written down on paper. Shared writing gives the teacher many opportunities to encourage their quieter or more reluctant students to engage in the discussion with the types of questions the teacher asks.

Writing well is a skill that is developed over time with much practice. Shared writing allows students to engage in the writing process while observing the construction of a high-quality sample. It is a very effective instructional strategy used to teach writing.

‘Four Square’

Michele Morgan has been writing IEPs and behavior plans to help students be more successful for 17 years. She is a national-board-certified teacher, Utah Teacher Fellow with Hope Street Group, and a special education elementary new-teacher specialist with the Granite school district. Follow her @MicheleTMorgan1:

For many students, writing is the most dreaded part of the school day. Writing involves many complex processes that students have to engage in before they produce a product—they must determine what they will write about, they must organize their thoughts into a logical sequence, and they must do the actual writing, whether on a computer or by hand. Still they are not done—they must edit their writing and revise mistakes. With all of that, it’s no wonder that students struggle with writing assignments.

In my years working with elementary special education students, I have found that writing is the most difficult subject to teach. Not only do my students struggle with the writing process, but they often have the added difficulties of not knowing how to spell words and not understanding how to use punctuation correctly. That is why the single most effective strategy I use when teaching writing is the Four Square graphic organizer.

The Four Square instructional strategy was developed in 1999 by Judith S. Gould and Evan Jay Gould. When I first started teaching, a colleague allowed me to borrow the Goulds’ book about using the Four Square method, and I have used it ever since. The Four Square is a graphic organizer that students can make themselves when given a blank sheet of paper. They fold it into four squares and draw a box in the middle of the page. The genius of this instructional strategy is that it can be used by any student, in any grade level, for any writing assignment. These are some of the ways I have used this strategy successfully with my students:

* Writing sentences: Students can write the topic for the sentence in the middle box, and in each square, they can draw pictures of details they want to add to their writing.

* Writing paragraphs: Students write the topic sentence in the middle box. They write a sentence containing a supporting detail in three of the squares and they write a concluding sentence in the last square.

* Writing short essays: Students write what information goes in the topic paragraph in the middle box, then list details to include in supporting paragraphs in the squares.

When I gave students writing assignments, the first thing I had them do was create a Four Square. We did this so often that it became automatic. After filling in the Four Square, they wrote rough drafts by copying their work off of the graphic organizer and into the correct format, either on lined paper or in a Word document. This worked for all of my special education students!

I was able to modify tasks using the Four Square so that all of my students could participate, regardless of their disabilities. Even if they did not know what to write about, they knew how to start the assignment (which is often the hardest part of getting it done!) and they grew to be more confident in their writing abilities.

In addition, when it was time to take the high-stakes state writing tests at the end of the year, this was a strategy my students could use to help them do well on the tests. I was able to give them a sheet of blank paper, and they knew what to do with it. I have used many different curriculum materials and programs to teach writing in the last 16 years, but the Four Square is the one strategy that I have used with every writing assignment, no matter the grade level, because it is so effective.

‘Swift Structures’

Joy Hamm has taught 11 years in a variety of English-language settings, ranging from kindergarten to adult learners. The last few years working with middle and high school Newcomers and completing her M.Ed in TESOL have fostered stronger advocacy in her district and beyond:

A majority of secondary content assessments include open-ended essay questions. Many students falter (not just ELs) because they are unaware of how to quickly organize their thoughts into a cohesive argument. In fact, the WIDA CAN DO Descriptors list level 5 writing proficiency as “organizing details logically and cohesively.” Thus, the most effective cross-curricular secondary writing strategy I use with my intermediate LTELs (long-term English-learners) is what I call “Swift Structures.” This term simply means reading a prompt across any content area and quickly jotting down an outline to organize a strong response.

To implement Swift Structures, begin by displaying a prompt and modeling how to swiftly create a bubble map or outline beginning with a thesis/opinion, then connecting the three main topics, which are each supported by at least three details. Emphasize this is NOT the time for complete sentences, just bulleted words or phrases.

Once the outline is completed, show your ELs how easy it is to plug in transitions, expand the bullets into detailed sentences, and add a brief introduction and conclusion. After modeling and guided practice, set a 5-10 minute timer and have students practice independently. Swift Structures is one of my weekly bell ringers, so students build confidence and skill over time. It is best to start with easy prompts where students have preformed opinions and knowledge in order to focus their attention on the thesis-topics-supporting-details outline, not struggling with the rigor of a content prompt.

Here is one easy prompt example: “Should students be allowed to use their cellphones in class?”

Swift Structure outline:

Thesis - Students should be allowed to use cellphones because (1) higher engagement (2) learning tools/apps (3) gain 21st-century skills

Topic 1. Cellphones create higher engagement in students...

Details A. interactive (Flipgrid, Kahoot)

B. less tempted by distractions

C. teaches responsibility

Topic 2. Furthermore,...access to learning tools...

A. Google Translate description

B. language practice (Duolingo)

C. content tutorials (Kahn Academy)

Topic 3. In addition,...practice 21st-century skills…

Details A. prep for workforce

B. access to information

C. time-management support

This bare-bones outline is like the frame of a house. Get the structure right, and it’s easier to fill in the interior decorating (style, grammar), roof (introduction) and driveway (conclusion). Without the frame, the roof and walls will fall apart, and the reader is left confused by circuitous rubble.

Once LTELs have mastered creating simple Swift Structures in less than 10 minutes, it is time to introduce complex questions similar to prompts found on content assessments or essays. Students need to gain assurance that they can quickly and logically explain and justify their opinions on multiple content essays without freezing under pressure.

Thanks to Jenny, Michele, and Joy for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo .

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How to Teach Creative Writing | 7 Steps to Get Students Wordsmithing

“I don’t have any ideas!”

“I can’t think of anything!”

While we see creative writing as a world of limitless imagination, our students often see an overwhelming desert of “no idea.”

But when you teach creative writing effectively, you’ll notice that  every  student is brimming over with ideas that just have to get out.

So what does teaching creative writing effectively look like?

We’ve outlined a  seven-step method  that will  scaffold your students through each phase of the creative process  from idea generation through to final edits.

7. Create inspiring and original prompts

Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired:

• personal memories (“Write about a person who taught you an important lesson”)
• imaginative scenarios
• prompts based on a familiar mentor text (e.g. “Write an alternative ending to your favorite book”). These are especially useful for giving struggling students an easy starting point.
• lead-in sentences (“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”).
• fascinating or thought-provoking images with a directive (“Who do you think lives in this mountain cabin? Tell their story”).

Don’t have the time or stuck for ideas? Check out our list of 100 student writing prompts

6. unpack the prompts together.

Explicitly teach your students how to dig deeper into the prompt for engaging and original ideas.

Probing questions are an effective strategy for digging into a prompt. Take this one for example:

“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”

Ask “What questions need answering here?” The first thing students will want to know is:

What happened overnight?

No doubt they’ll be able to come up with plenty of zany answers to that question, but there’s another one they could ask to make things much more interesting:

Who might “I” be?

In this way, you subtly push students to go beyond the obvious and into more original and thoughtful territory. It’s even more useful with a deep prompt:

“Write a story where the main character starts to question something they’ve always believed.”

Here students could ask:

• What sorts of beliefs do people take for granted?
• What might make us question those beliefs?
• What happens when we question something we’ve always thought is true?
• How do we feel when we discover that something isn’t true?

Try splitting students into groups, having each group come up with probing questions for a prompt, and then discussing potential “answers” to these questions as a class.

The most important lesson at this point should be that good ideas take time to generate. So don’t rush this step!

5. Warm-up for writing

A quick warm-up activity will:

• allow students to see what their discussed ideas look like on paper
• help fix the “I don’t know how to start” problem
• warm up writing muscles quite literally (especially important for young learners who are still developing handwriting and fine motor skills).

Freewriting  is a particularly effective warm-up. Give students 5–10 minutes to “dump” all their ideas for a prompt onto the page for without worrying about structure, spelling, or grammar.

After about five minutes you’ll notice them starting to get into the groove, and when you call time, they’ll have a better idea of what captures their interest.

Did you know? The Story Factory in Reading Eggs allows your students to write and publish their own storybooks using an easy step-by-step guide.

4. Start planning

Now it’s time for students to piece all these raw ideas together and generate a plan. This will synthesize disjointed ideas and give them a roadmap for the writing process.

Note:  at this stage your strong writers might be more than ready to get started on a creative piece. If so, let them go for it – use planning for students who are still puzzling things out.

Here are four ideas for planning:

Graphic organisers

A graphic organiser will allow your students to plan out the overall structure of their writing. They’re also particularly useful in “chunking” the writing process, so students don’t see it as one big wall of text.

Storyboards and illustrations

These will engage your artistically-minded students and give greater depth to settings and characters. Just make sure that drawing doesn’t overshadow the writing process.

Voice recordings

If you have students who are hesitant to commit words to paper, tell them to think out loud and record it on their device. Often they’ll be surprised at how well their spoken words translate to the page.

Write a blurb

This takes a bit more explicit teaching, but it gets students to concisely summarize all their main ideas (without giving away spoilers). Look at some blurbs on the back of published books before getting them to write their own. Afterward they could test it out on a friend – based on the blurb, would they borrow it from the library?

3. Produce rough drafts

Warmed up and with a plan at the ready, your students are now ready to start wordsmithing. But before they start on a draft, remind them of what a draft is supposed to be:

• a work in progress.

Remind them that  if they wait for the perfect words to come, they’ll end up with blank pages .

Instead, it’s time to take some writing risks and get messy. Encourage this by:

• demonstrating the writing process to students yourself
• taking the focus off spelling and grammar (during the drafting stage)
• providing meaningful and in-depth feedback (using words, not ticks!).

Reading Eggs also gives you access to an ever-expanding collection of over 3,500 online books!

2. share drafts for peer feedback.

Don’t saddle yourself with 30 drafts for marking. Peer assessment is a better (and less exhausting) way to ensure everyone receives the feedback they need.

Why? Because for something as personal as creative writing, feedback often translates better when it’s in the familiar and friendly language that only a peer can produce. Looking at each other’s work will also give students more ideas about how they can improve their own.

Scaffold peer feedback to ensure it’s constructive. The following methods work well:

Student rubrics

A simple rubric allows students to deliver more in-depth feedback than “It was pretty good.” The criteria will depend on what you are ultimately looking for, but students could assess each other’s:

• use of language.

Whatever you opt for, just make sure the language you use in the rubric is student-friendly.

Two positives and a focus area

Have students identify two things their peer did well, and one area that they could focus on further, then turn this into written feedback. Model the process for creating specific comments so you get something more constructive than “It was pretty good.” It helps to use stems such as:

I really liked this character because…

I found this idea interesting because it made me think…

I was a bit confused by…

I wonder why you… Maybe you could… instead.

1. The editing stage

Now that students have a draft and feedback, here’s where we teachers often tell them to “go over it” or “give it some final touches.”

But our students don’t always know how to edit.

Scaffold the process with questions that encourage students to think critically about their writing, such as:

• Are there any parts that would be confusing if I wasn’t there to explain them?
• Are there any parts that seem irrelevant to the rest?
• Which parts am I most uncertain about?
• Does the whole thing flow together, or are there parts that seem out of place?
• Are there places where I could have used a better word?
• Are there any grammatical or spelling errors I notice?

Key to this process is getting students to  read their creative writing from start to finish .

Important note:  if your students are using a word processor, show them where the spell-check is and how to use it. Sounds obvious, but in the age of autocorrect, many students simply don’t know.

A final word on teaching creative writing

Remember that the best writers write regularly.

Incorporate them into your lessons as often as possible, and soon enough, you’ll have just as much fun  marking  your students’ creative writing as they do producing it.

Need more help supporting your students’ writing?

Read up on  how to get reluctant writers writing , strategies for  supporting struggling secondary writers , or check out our huge list of writing prompts for kids .

Watch your students get excited about writing and publishing their own storybooks in the Story Factory

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30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

The following ideas originated as full-length articles in National Writing Project publications over a 30-year period from 1974-2004. Links to the full articles accompany each idea.

Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

• Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.
• Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.
• Use writing to improve relations among students.
• Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.
• Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary.
• Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.
• Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.
• Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.
• Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.
• Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.
• Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.
• Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.
• Practice and play with revision techniques.
• Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.
• Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency.
• Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.
• Require written response to peers’ writing.
• Make writing reflection tangible.
• Make grammar instruction dynamic.
• Ask students to experiment with sentence length.
• Help students ask questions about their writing.
• Challenge students to find active verbs.
• Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.
• Ground writing in social issues important to students.
• Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.
• Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.
• Think like a football coach.
• Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.
• Use home language on the road to Standard English.
• Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

1. Use the shared events of students’ lives to inspire writing.

Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith’s words, is “natural and purposeful.”

When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem. When Michael rode his bike without training wheels for the first time, this occasion provided a worthwhile topic to write about. A new baby in a family, a lost tooth, and the death of one student’s father were the playful or serious inspirations for student writing.

Says Rotkow: “Our classroom reverberated with the stories of our lives as we wrote, talked, and reflected about who we were, what we did, what we thought, and how we thought about it. We became a community.”

ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure About Helping Students Write the Stories of Their Lives,” The Quarterly (25) 4.

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2. Establish an email dialogue between students from different schools who are reading the same book.

When high school teacher Karen Murar and college instructor Elaine Ware, teacher-consultants with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, discovered students were scheduled to read the August Wilson play Fences at the same time, they set up email communication between students to allow some “teacherless talk” about the text.

Rather than typical teacher-led discussion, the project fostered independent conversation between students. Formal classroom discussion of the play did not occur until students had completed all email correspondence. Though teachers were not involved in student online dialogues, the conversations evidenced the same reading strategies promoted in teacher-led discussion, including predication, clarification, interpretation, and others.

MURAR, KAREN, and ELAINE WARE. 1998. “Teacherless Talk: Impressions from Electronic Literacy Conversations.” The Quarterly (20) 3.

3. Use writing to improve relations among students.

Diane Waff, co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, taught in an urban school where boys outnumbered girls four to one in her classroom. The situation left girls feeling overwhelmed, according to Waff, and their “voices faded into the background, overpowered by more aggressive male voices.”

Determined not to ignore this unhealthy situation, Waff urged students to face the problem head-on, asking them to write about gender-based problems in their journals. She then introduced literature that considered relationships between the sexes, focusing on themes of romance, love, and marriage. Students wrote in response to works as diverse as de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Dean Myers’s Motown and DiDi.

In the beginning there was a great dissonance between male and female responses. According to Waff, “Girls focused on feelings; boys focused on sex, money, and the fleeting nature of romantic attachment.” But as the students continued to write about and discuss their honest feelings, they began to notice that they had similar ideas on many issues. “By confronting these gender-based problems directly,” says Waff, “the effect was to improve the lives of individual students and the social well-being of the wider school community.”

WAFF, DIANE. 1995. “Romance in the Classroom: Inviting Discourse on Gender and Power.” The Quarterly (17) 2.

4. Help student writers draw rich chunks of writing from endless sprawl.

Jan Matsuoka, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), describes a revision conference she held with a third grade English language learner named Sandee, who had written about a recent trip to Los Angeles.

“I told her I wanted her story to have more focus,” writes Matsuoka. “I could tell she was confused so I made rough sketches representing the events of her trip. I made a small frame out of a piece of paper and placed it down on one of her drawings—a sketch she had made of a visit with her grandmother.”

“Focus, I told her, means writing about the memorable details of the visit with your grandmother, not everything else you did on the trip.”

“‘Oh, I get it,’ Sandee smiled, ‘like just one cartoon, not a whole bunch.'”

Sandee’s next draft was more deep than broad.

MATSUOKA, JAN. 1998. “Revising Revision: How My Students Transformed Writers’ Workshop.” The Quarterly (20) 1.

5. Work with words relevant to students’ lives to help them build vocabulary.

Eileen Simmons, a teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, knows that the more relevant new words are to students’ lives, the more likely they are to take hold.

In her high school classroom, she uses a form of the children’s ABC book as a community-building project. For each letter of the alphabet, the students find an appropriately descriptive word for themselves. Students elaborate on the word by writing sentences and creating an illustration. In the process, they make extensive use of the dictionary and thesaurus.

One student describes her personality as sometimes “caustic,” illustrating the word with a photograph of a burning car in a war zone. Her caption explains that she understands the hurt her “burning” sarcastic remarks can generate.

SIMMONS, EILEEN. 2002. “Visualizing Vocabulary.” The Quarterly (24) 3.

6. Help students analyze text by asking them to imagine dialogue between authors.

John Levine, a teacher-consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project (California), helps his college freshmen integrate the ideas of several writers into a single analytical essay by asking them to create a dialogue among those writers.

He tells his students, for instance, “imagine you are the moderator of a panel discussion on the topic these writers are discussing. Consider the three writers and construct a dialogue among the four ‘voices’ (the three essayists plus you).”

Levine tells students to format the dialogue as though it were a script. The essay follows from this preparation.

LEVINE, JOHN. 2002. “Talking Texts: Writing Dialogue in the College Composition Classroom.” The Quarterly (24) 2.

7. Spotlight language and use group brainstorming to help students create poetry.

The following is a group poem created by second grade students of Michelle Fleer, a teacher-consultant with the Dakota Writing Project (South Dakota).

Underwater Crabs crawl patiently along the ocean floor searching for prey. Fish soundlessly weave their way through slippery seaweed Whales whisper to others as they slide through the salty water. And silent waves wash into a dark cave where an octopus is sleeping.

Fleer helped her students get started by finding a familiar topic. (In this case her students had been studying sea life.) She asked them to brainstorm language related to the sea, allowing them time to list appropriate nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students then used these words to create phrases and used the phrases to produce the poem itself.

As a group, students put together words in ways Fleer didn’t believe many of them could have done if they were working on their own, and after creating several group poems, some students felt confident enough to work alone.

FLEER, MICHELLE. 2002. “Beyond ‘Pink is a Rose.'” The Quarterly (24) 4.

8. Ask students to reflect on and write about their writing.

Douglas James Joyce, a teacher-consultant with the Denver Writing Project, makes use of what he calls “metawriting” in his college writing classes. He sees metawriting (writing about writing) as a way to help students reduce errors in their academic prose.

Joyce explains one metawriting strategy: After reading each essay, he selects one error that occurs frequently in a student’s work and points out each instance in which the error is made. He instructs the student to write a one page essay, comparing and contrasting three sources that provide guidance on the established use of that particular convention, making sure a variety of sources are available.

“I want the student to dig into the topic as deeply as necessary, to come away with a thorough understanding of the how and why of the usage, and to understand any debate that may surround the particular usage.”

JOYCE, DOUGLAS JAMES. 2002. “On the Use of Metawriting to Learn Grammar and Mechanics.” The Quarterly (24) 4.

9. Ease into writing workshops by presenting yourself as a model.

Glorianne Bradshaw, a teacher-consultant with the Red River Valley Writing Project (North Dakota), decided to make use of experiences from her own life when teaching her first-graders how to write.

For example, on an overhead transparency she shows a sketch of herself stirring cookie batter while on vacation. She writes the phrase “made cookies” under the sketch. Then she asks students to help her write a sentence about this. She writes the words who, where, and when. Using these words as prompts, she and the students construct the sentence, “I made cookies in the kitchen in the morning.”

Next, each student returns to the sketch he or she has made of a summer vacation activity and, with her help, answers the same questions answered for Bradshaw’s drawing. Then she asks them, “Tell me more. Do the cookies have chocolate chips? Does the pizza have pepperoni?” These facts lead to other sentences.

Rather than taking away creativity, Bradshaw believes this kind of structure gives students a helpful format for creativity.

BRADSHAW, GLORIANNE. 2001. “Back to Square One: What to do When Writing Workshop Just Doesn’t Work.” The Quarterly (23) 1.

10. Get students to focus on their writing by holding off on grading.

Stephanie Wilder found that the grades she gave her high school students were getting in the way of their progress. The weaker students stopped trying. Other students relied on grades as the only standard by which they judged their own work.

“I decided to postpone my grading until the portfolios, which contained a selection of student work, were complete,” Wilder says. She continued to comment on papers, encourage revision, and urge students to meet with her for conferences. But she waited to grade the papers.

It took a while for students to stop leafing to the ends of their papers in search of a grade, and there was some grumbling from students who had always received excellent grades. But she believes that because she was less quick to judge their work, students were better able to evaluate their efforts themselves.

WILDER, STEPHANIE. 1997. “Pruning Too Early: The Thorny Issue of Grading Student Writing.” The Quarterly (19) 4.

11. Use casual talk about students’ lives to generate writing.

Erin (Pirnot) Ciccone, teacher-consultant with the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project, found a way to make more productive the “Monday morning gab fest” she used as a warm-up with her fifth grade students. She conceived of “Headline News.” As students entered the classroom on Monday mornings, they wrote personal headlines about their weekends and posted them on the bulletin board. A headline might read “Fifth-Grader Stranded at Movie Theatre” or “Girl Takes on Responsibility as Mother’s Helper.”

After the headlines had been posted, students had a chance to guess the stories behind them. The writers then told the stories behind their headlines. As each student had only three minutes to talk, they needed to make decisions about what was important and to clarify details as they proceeded. They began to rely on suspense and “purposeful ambiguity” to hold listeners’ interest.

On Tuesday, students committed their stories to writing. Because of the “Headline News” experience, Ciccone’s students have been able to generate writing that is focused, detailed, and well ordered.

CICCONE, ERIN (PIRNOT). 2001. “A Place for Talk in Writers’ Workshop.” The Quarterly (23) 4.

12. Give students a chance to write to an audience for real purpose.

Patricia A. Slagle, high school teacher and teacher-consultant with the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), understands the difference between writing for a hypothetical purpose and writing to an audience for real purpose. She illustrates the difference by contrasting two assignments.

She began with: “Imagine you are the drama critic for your local newspaper. Write a review of an imaginary production of the play we have just finished studying in class.” This prompt asks students to assume the contrived role of a professional writer and drama critic. They must adapt to a voice that is not theirs and pretend to have knowledge they do not have.

Slagle developed a more effective alternative: “Write a letter to the director of your local theater company in which you present arguments for producing the play that we have just finished studying in class.” This prompt, Slagle says, allows the writer her own voice, building into her argument concrete references to personal experience. “Of course,” adds Slagle, “this prompt would constitute authentic writing only for those students who, in fact, would like to see the play produced.”

SLAGLE, PATRICIA A. 1997. “Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prompts.” The Quarterly (19) 3.

13. Practice and play with revision techniques.

Mark Farrington, college instructor and teacher-consultant with the Northern Virginia Writing Project, believes teaching revision sometimes means practicing techniques of revision. An exercise like “find a place other than the first sentence where this essay might begin” is valuable because it shows student writers the possibilities that exist in writing.

For Farrington’s students, practice can sometime turn to play with directions to:

• add five colors
• add four action verbs
• add one metaphor
• add five sensory details.

In his college fiction writing class, Farrington asks students to choose a spot in the story where the main character does something that is crucial to the rest of the story. At that moment, Farrington says, they must make the character do the exact opposite.

“Playing at revision can lead to insightful surprises,” Farrington says. “When they come, revision doesn’t seem such hard work anymore.”

FARRINGTON, MARK. 1999. “Four Principles Toward Teaching the Craft of Revision.” The Quarterly (21) 2.

14. Pair students with adult reading/writing buddies.

Bernadette Lambert, teacher-consultant with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (Georgia), wondered what would happen if she had her sixth-grade students pair with an adult family member to read a book. She asked the students about the kinds of books they wanted to read (mysteries, adventure, ghost stories) and the adults about the kinds of books they wanted to read with the young people (character-building values, multiculturalism, no ghost stories). Using these suggestions for direction, Lambert developed a list of 30 books. From this list, each student-adult pair chose one. They committed themselves to read and discuss the book and write separate reviews.

Most of the students, says Lambert, were proud to share a piece of writing done by their adult reading buddy. Several admitted that they had never before had this level of intellectual conversation with an adult family member.

LAMBERT, BERNADETTE. 1999. “You and Me and a Book Makes Three.” The Quarterly (21) 3.

15. Teach “tension” to move students beyond fluency.

Suzanne Linebarger, a co-director of the Northern California Writing Project, recognized that one element lacking from many of her students’ stories was tension. One day, in front of the class, she demonstrated tension with a rubber band. Looped over her finger, the rubber band merely dangled. “However,” she told the students, “when I stretch it out and point it (not at a student), the rubber band suddenly becomes more interesting. It’s the tension, the potential energy, that rivets your attention. It’s the same in writing.”

Linebarger revised a generic writing prompt to add an element of tension. The initial prompt read, “Think of a friend who is special to you. Write about something your friend has done for you, you have done for your friend, or you have done together.”

Linebarger didn’t want responses that settled for “my best friend was really good to me,” so “during the rewrite session we talked about how hard it is to stay friends when met with a challenge. Students talked about times they had let their friends down or times their friends had let them down, and how they had managed to stay friends in spite of their problems. In other words, we talked about some tense situations that found their way into their writing.”

LINEBARGER, SUZANNE. 2001. “Tensing Up: Moving From Fluency to Flair.” The Quarterly (23) 3.

16. Encourage descriptive writing by focusing on the sounds of words.

Ray Skjelbred, middle school teacher at Marin Country Day School, wants his seventh grade students to listen to language. He wants to begin to train their ears by asking them to make lists of wonderful sounding words. “This is strictly a listening game,” says Skjelbred. “They shouldn’t write lunch just because they’re hungry.” When the collective list is assembled, Skjelbred asks students to make sentences from some of the words they’ve collected. They may use their own words, borrow from other contributors, add other words as necessary, and change word forms.

Among the words on one student’s list: tumble, detergent, sift, bubble, syllable, creep, erupt, and volcano . The student writes:

A man loads his laundry into the tumbling washer, the detergent sifting through the bubbling water. The syllables creep through her teeth. The fog erupts like a volcano in the dust.

“Unexpected words can go together, creating amazing images,” says Skjelbred.

SKJELBRED, RAY. 1997. “Sound and Sense: Grammar, Poetry, and Creative Language.” The Quarterly (19) 4.

17. Require written response to peers’ writing.

Kathleen O’Shaughnessy, co-director of the National Writing Project of Acadiana (Louisiana), asks her middle school students to respond to each others’ writing on Post-it Notes. Students attach their comments to a piece of writing under consideration.

“I’ve found that when I require a written response on a Post-it instead of merely allowing students to respond verbally, the responders take their duties more seriously and, with practice, the quality of their remarks improves.”

One student wrote:

While I was reading your piece, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster. It started out kinda slow, but you could tell there was something exciting coming up. But then it moved real fast and stopped all of a sudden. I almost needed to read it again the way you ride a roller coaster over again because it goes too fast.

Says O’Shaughnessy, “This response is certainly more useful to the writer than the usual ‘I think you could, like, add some more details, you know?’ that I often overheard in response meetings.”

O’SHAUGHNESSY, KATHLEEN. 2001. “Everything I Know About Teaching Language Arts, I Learned at the Office Supply Store.” The Quarterly (23) 2.

18. Make writing reflection tangible.

Anna Collins Trest, director of the South Mississippi Writing Project, finds she can lead upper elementary school students to better understand the concept of “reflection” if she anchors the discussion in the concrete and helps students establish categories for their reflective responses.

She decided to use mirrors to teach the reflective process. Each student had one. As the students gazed at their own reflections, she asked this question: “What can you think about while looking in the mirror at your own reflection?” As they answered, she categorized each response:

• I think I’m a queen – pretending/imagining
• I look at my cavities – examining/observing
• I think I’m having a bad hair day – forming opinions
• What will I look like when I am old? – questioning
• My hair is parted in the middle – describing
• I’m thinking about when I broke my nose – remembering
• I think I look better than my brother – comparing
• Everything on my face looks sad today – expressing emotion.

Trest talked with students about the categories and invited them to give personal examples of each. Then she asked them to look in the mirrors again, reflect on their images, and write.

“Elementary students are literal in their thinking,” Trest says, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creative.”

TREST, ANNA COLLINS. 1999. “I was a Journal Topic Junkie.” The Quarterly (21) 4.

19. Make grammar instruction dynamic.

Philip Ireland, teacher-consultant with the San Marcos Writing Project (California), believes in active learning. One of his strategies has been to take his seventh-graders on a “preposition walk” around the school campus. Walking in pairs, they tell each other what they are doing:

I’m stepping off the grass . I’m talking to my friend .

“Students soon discover that everything they do contains prepositional phrases. I walk among my students prompting answers,” Ireland explains.

“I’m crawling under the tennis net ,” Amanda proclaims from her hands and knees. “The prepositional phrase is under the net .”

“The preposition?” I ask.

“ Under .”

IRELAND, PHILIP. 2003. “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

20. Ask students to experiment with sentence length.

Kim Stafford, director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis and Clark College, wants his students to discard old notions that sentences should be a certain length. He explains to his students that a writer’s command of long and short sentences makes for a “more pliable” writing repertoire. He describes the exercise he uses to help students experiment with sentence length.

“I invite writers to compose a sentence that goes on for at least a page — and no fair cheating with a semicolon. Just use ‘and’ when you have to, or a dash, or make a list, and keep it going.” After years of being told not to, they take pleasure in writing the greatest run-on sentences they can.

“Then we shake out our writing hands, take a blank page, and write from the upper left to the lower right corner again, but this time letting no sentence be longer than four words, but every sentence must have a subject and a verb.”

Stafford compares the first style of sentence construction to a river and the second to a drum. “Writers need both,” he says. “Rivers have long rhythms. Drums roll.”

STAFFORD, KIM. 2003. “Sentence as River and as Drum.” The Quarterly (25) 3.

21. Help students ask questions about their writing.

Joni Chancer, teacher-consultant of the South Coast Writing Project (California), has paid a lot of attention to the type of questions she wants her upper elementary students to consider as they re-examine their writing, reflecting on pieces they may make part of their portfolios. Here are some of the questions:

Why did I write this piece? Where did I get my ideas? Who is the audience and how did it affect this piece? What skills did I work on in this piece? Was this piece easy or difficult to write? Why? What parts did I rework? What were my revisions? Did I try something new? What skills did I work on in this piece? What elements of writer’s craft enhanced my story? What might I change? Did something I read influence my writing? What did I learn or what did I expect the reader to learn? Where will I go from here? Will I publish it? Share it? Expand it? Toss it? File it?

Chancer cautions that these questions should not be considered a “reflection checklist,” rather they are questions that seem to be addressed frequently when writers tell the story of a particular piece.

CHANCER, JONI. 2001. “The Teacher’s Role in Portfolio Assessment.” In The Whole Story: Teachers Talk About Portfolios , edited by Mary Ann Smith and Jane Juska. Berkeley, California: National Writing Project.

22. Challenge students to find active verbs.

Nancy Lilly, co-director of the Greater New Orleans Writing Project, wanted her fourth and fifth grade students to breathe life into their nonfiction writing. She thought the student who wrote this paragraph could do better:

The jaguar is the biggest and strongest cat in the rainforest. The jaguar’s jaw is strong enough to crush a turtle’s shell. Jaguars also have very powerful legs for leaping from branch to branch to chase prey.

Building on an idea from Stephanie Harvey (Nonfiction Matters, Stenhouse, 1998) Lilly introduced the concept of “nouns as stuff” and verbs as “what stuff does.”

In a brainstorming session related to the students’ study of the rain forest, the class supplied the following assistance to the writer:

Stuff/Nouns : What Stuff Does/Verbs jaguar : leaps, pounces jaguar’s : legs pump jaguar’s : teeth crush jaguar’s : mouth devours

This was just the help the writer needed to create the following revised paragraph:

As the sun disappears from the heart of the forest, the jaguar leaps through the underbrush, pumping its powerful legs. It spies a gharial gliding down the river. The jungle cat pounces, crushing the turtle with his teeth, devouring the reptile with pleasure.

LILLY, NANCY. “Dead or Alive: How will Students’ Nonfiction Writing Arrive?” The Quarterly (25) 4.

23. Require students to make a persuasive written argument in support of a final grade.

For a final exam, Sarah Lorenz, a teacher-consultant with the Eastern Michigan Writing Project, asks her high school students to make a written argument for the grade they think they should receive. Drawing on work they have done over the semester, students make a case for how much they have learned in the writing class.

“The key to convincing me,” says Lorenz, “is the use of detail. They can’t simply say they have improved as writers—they have to give examples and even quote their own writing…They can’t just say something was helpful—they have to tell me why they thought it was important, how their thinking changed, or how they applied this learning to everyday life.”

LORENZ, SARAH. 2001. “Beyond Rhetoric: A Reflective Persuasive Final Exam for the Writing Classroom.” The Quarterly (23) 4.

24. Ground writing in social issues important to students.

Jean Hicks, director, and Tim Johnson, a co-director, both of the Louisville Writing Project (Kentucky), have developed a way to help high school students create brief, effective dramas about issues in their lives. The class, working in groups, decides on a theme such as jealousy, sibling rivalry, competition, or teen drinking. Each group develops a scene illustrating an aspect of this chosen theme.

Considering the theme of sibling rivalry, for instance, students identify possible scenes with topics such as “I Had It First” (competing for family resources) and “Calling in the Troops” (tattling). Students then set up the circumstances and characters.

Hicks and Johnson give each of the “characters” a different color packet of Post-it Notes. Each student develops and posts dialogue for his or her character. As the scene emerges, Post-its can be added, moved, and deleted. They remind students of the conventions of drama such as conflict and resolution. Scenes, when acted out, are limited to 10 minutes.

“It’s not so much about the genre or the product as it is about creating a culture that supports the thinking and learning of writers,” write Hicks and Johnson.

HICKS, JEAN and TIM JOHNSON. 2000. “Staging Learning: The Play’s the Thing.” The Quarterly (22) 3.

25. Encourage the “framing device” as an aid to cohesion in writing.

Romana Hillebrand, a teacher-consultant with the Northwest Inland Writing Project (Idaho), asks her university students to find a literary or historical reference or a personal narrative that can provide a fresh way into and out of their writing, surrounding it much like a window frame surrounds a glass pane.

Hillebrand provides this example:

A student in her research class wrote a paper on the relationship between humans and plants, beginning with a reference to the nursery rhyme, “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies….” She explained the rhymes as originating with the practice of masking the stench of death with flowers during the Black Plague. The student finished the paper with the sentence, “Without plants, life on Earth would cease to exist as we know it; ashes, ashes we all fall down.”

Hillebrand concludes that linking the introduction and the conclusion helps unify a paper and satisfy the reader.

HILLEBRAND, ROMANA. 2001. “It’s a Frame Up: Helping Students Devise Beginning and Endings.”The Quarterly (23) 1.

26. Use real world examples to reinforce writing conventions.

Suzanne Cherry, director of the Swamp Fox Writing Project (South Carolina), has her own way of dramatizing the comma splice error. She brings to class two pieces of wire, the last inch of each exposed. She tells her college students, “We need to join these pieces of wire together right now if we are to be able to watch our favorite TV show. What can we do? We could use some tape, but that would probably be a mistake as the puppy could easily eat through the connection. By splicing the wires in this way, we are creating a fire hazard.”

A better connection, the students usually suggest, would be to use one of those electrical connectors that look like pen caps.

“Now,” Cherry says (often to the accompaniment of multiple groans), “let’s turn these wires into sentences. If we simply splice them together with a comma, the equivalent of a piece of tape, we create a weak connection, or a comma splice error. What then would be the grammatical equivalent of the electrical connector? Think conjunction – and, but, or. Or try a semicolon. All of these show relationships between sentences in a way that the comma, a device for taping clauses together in a slapdash manner, does not.”

“I’ve been teaching writing for many years,” Cherry says. “And I now realize the more able we are to relate the concepts of writing to ‘real world’ experience, the more successful we will be.”

CHERRY, SUZANNE. “Keeping the Comma Splice Queen Happy,” The Voice (9) 1.

27. Think like a football coach.

In addition to his work as a high school teacher of writing, Dan Holt, a co-director with the Third Coast Writing Project (Michigan), spent 20 years coaching football. While doing the latter, he learned quite a bit about doing the former. Here is some of what he found out:

The writing teacher can’t stay on the sidelines. “When I modeled for my players, they knew what I wanted them to do.” The same involvement, he says, is required to successfully teach writing.

Like the coach, the writing teacher should praise strong performance rather than focus on the negative. Statements such as “Wow, that was a killer block,” or “That paragraph was tight” will turn “butterball” ninth-grade boys into varsity linemen and insecure adolescents into aspiring poets.

The writing teacher should apply the KISS theory: Keep it simple stupid. Holt explains for a freshman quarterback, audibles (on-field commands) are best used with care until a player has reached a higher skill level. In writing class, a student who has never written a poem needs to start with small verse forms such as a chinquapin or haiku.

Practice and routine are important both for football players and for writing students, but football players and writers also need the “adrenaline rush” of the big game and the final draft.

HOLT, DAN. 1999. “What Coaching Football Taught Me about Teaching Writing.” The Voice (4) 3.

28. Allow classroom writing to take a page from yearbook writing.

High school teacher Jon Appleby noticed that when yearbooks fell into students’ hands “my curriculum got dropped in a heartbeat for spirited words scribbled over photos.” Appleby wondered, “How can I make my classroom as fascinating and consuming as the yearbook?”

Here are some ideas that yearbook writing inspired:

Take pictures, put them on the bulletin boards, and have students write captions for them. Then design small descriptive writing assignments using the photographs of events such as the prom and homecoming. Afterwards, ask students to choose quotes from things they have read that represent what they feel and think and put them on the walls.

Check in about students’ lives. Recognize achievements and individuals the way that yearbook writers direct attention to each other. Ask students to write down memories and simply, joyfully share them. As yearbook writing usually does, insist on a sense of tomorrow.

APPLEBY, JON. 2001. “The School Yearbook: A Guide to Writing and Teaching.” The Voice (6) 3.

29. Use home language on the road to Standard English.

Eileen Kennedy, special education teacher at Medger Evers College, works with native speakers of Caribbean Creole who are preparing to teach in New York City. Sometimes she encourages these students to draft writing in their native Creole. The additional challenge becomes to re-draft this writing, rendered in patois, into Standard English.

She finds that narratives involving immigrant Caribbean natives in unfamiliar situations — buying a refrigerator, for instance — lead to inspired writing. In addition, some students expressed their thoughts more proficiently in Standard English after drafting in their vernaculars.

KENNEDY, EILEEN. 2003. “Writing in Home Dialects: Choosing a Written Discourse in a Teacher Education Class.” The Quarterly (25) 2.

30. Introduce multi-genre writing in the context of community service.

Jim Wilcox, teacher-consultant with the Oklahoma Writing Project, requires his college students to volunteer at a local facility that serves the community, any place from the Special Olympics to a burn unit. Over the course of their tenure with the organization, students write in a number of genres: an objective report that describes the appearance and activity of the facility, a personal interview/profile, an evaluation essay that requires students to set up criteria by which to assess this kind of organization, an investigative report that includes information from a second source, and a letter to the editor of a campus newspaper or other publication.

Wilcox says, “Besides improving their researching skills, students learn that their community is indeed full of problems and frustrations. They also learn that their own talents and time are valuable assets in solving some of the world’s problems — one life at a time.”

WILCOX, JIM. 2003. “The Spirit of Volunteerism in English Composition.” The Quarterly (25) 2.

Topics/tags:

Also recommended, using metaphor to explore writing processes, thank you for sharing: developing students' social skills to improve peer writing conferences, intersections of poetry, prose and place.

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Creative writing in the classroom: five top tips for teachers

1. The rules of writing

I always tell students that there are no set rules for writing and they can write whatever they like. I don't subscribe to the notion that all good stories must have, for example, an attention-grabbing opening, a turning point, a twist at the end and an extended metaphor. Incorporating these into writing doesn't automatically mean a story works, and you will read wonderful writing follows none of these rules. Pupils should be aware of what they are, of course, and why and where they might choose to use them, but it shouldn't be prescriptive.

That said, there are two rules of writing that I encourage them to follow. These rules are: "show, don't tell" and "all adverbs must die". Not the most original rules, perhaps, but if kids can master them their writing becomes much more powerful.

For "show, don't tell", I display a selection of sentences that tell the reader something and ask the pupils to rewrite them in a way that shows the same information. For example, "the man was angry" could become, "the man clenched his fists and hissed beneath his breath". It's about unpacking the emotions and finding ways to let the reader see the story for themselves.

When teaching "all adverbs must die", I concentrate on the importance of giving the power to the verb. "I ran quickly" becomes "I sprinted". "I shouted loudly" becomes "I screamed". Once pupils realise the potential in this, they quickly kill adverbs and load the power of the action onto the verb.

2. Characterisation

Not the most original method I'll wager, but this is tried and tested. Pupils divide a page in their jotter and give each quarter the headings likes, dislikes, motivations and flaws. These need to be explained and discussed; I use Homer Simpson and Edward Cullen as models. What makes these complex and rich characters? What makes them get out of bed every morning? What stops them from achieving their ultimate goals in life? How would they react in various situations?

Once pupils have thought about these characters, I ask them to complete the page in their jotter with as many pieces of detail as they can for their own character. They swap with a partner and, using another person's character notes, write a monologue beginning with the line, "I lay away, unable to sleep, and all because…" What is this new character excited about, or scared of? What have they done or what will they have to do? This exercise is always busy, exciting and produces promising and complex pieces of writing.

3. Video clips

There's something a bit weird about the idea of being a writer; it's a vague, wishy-washy concept for students. They don't yet understand the hours of admin, self-promotion, editing, graft, grief and rejection that writers go through. Many pupls seem to think writers have great lives, are fabulously wealthy and sit around all day making up stories, all of which go on to be published without much bother at all. So I always like to find video clips of writers talking about writing, sharing the pain they've gone through, their thought processes and daily routines. If you can find video clips of a writer whose work you're using as a model or studying in class, then this can really help pupils to engage with their work.

YouTube is full of interviews with writers, recordings of book festival appearances and spoken-word performances. Being a Scottish teacher working in Scotland, I use of a suite of videos filmed and hosted by Education Scotland , which features a number of writers discussing their inspirations and motivations, how to create characters, how to write in genre and how to redraft. The videos are all around five minutes long which makes them excellent starter activities; you can find them here .

4. Narrative distance

This can be modelled in class by the teacher projecting their work onto the whiteboard. Most pupils assume that once they've chosen a narrative perspective and tense, their narrative voice will take care of itself. But with a little coaching and training, maybe we can hone their skills and abilities that much more.

Narrative distance is the proximity of a reader's experience to the character's thoughts. How close will we get? A close-up narrative would allow us to share the character's complete thought process, hear their heartbeat, feel their discomfort. A mid-distance narrative would give us key insights into pertinent thoughts the character has, but not bother us with every detail; we would see the character going into a coffee shop and have to surmise their mood and personality by observing how they react and interact. This is more of a film director's vantage point. And for a long-distance narrative, we only see the character from a distance – in the midst of other people, operating in a vast and complex society. We would come to understand them from the way they move through the world and the opinions that other characters have of them. It's a bird's eye view.

There is a lot in here, and mastering these narrative distances would take considerable effort and time. But if pupils could get to grips with them and become comfortable in zooming in and out on a story, then they will have developed some intricate and powerful writing abilities.

5. Story prompts

The oldest trick in the book, perhaps, but still a good one. Writing Prompts is an excellent website full of creative writing resources to use in class. I get pupils to choose one at random, and as they write, I write. It's important to set attainable goals for this – agree that by the end of five minutes everyone will have written 50 words, say, including the teacher.

Plug away at this and I always check the class for any strugglers at the end of regular intervals; if someone is stumped, I'll ask them what the problem is, what they tried to start writing at the beginning, what their last sentence is, and give them a couple of options for where to go next. By writing together it's possible to get a whole class writing happily, and at some stage they'll be content and confident enough with their stories to want to be let free to write without being asked for regular progress reports.

Alan Gillespie teaches English at an independent school in Glasgow. He writes stories and tweets at @afjgillespie

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8 Smart Strategies for Teaching Writing

Inside: Teaching writing DOESN’T have to be complicated! With these simple strategies, you can improve students’ writing without having to work so hard.

I turned around to an outstretched notebook in a kid’s hands.

“I don’t know what to do next,” said the student.

I leaned closer to decipher the 2nd-grade handwriting. Then with my most positive I’ll-guide-you-on-the-right-path tone, I gave the student an idea to run with.

I straightened up, ready to move about the class, peering over shoulders, offering feedback as needed.

My bubble was abruptly burst.

Standing behind me was a whole line of kids that didn’t know what to do next!

Have you been there, too? What you need are writing strategies for students that break down a complicated process into pieces they can tackle. 

What follows are some of the best methods for teaching writing that I discovered over the years:

Teaching Writing Strategies for Students

Use Mentor Texts

If you wanted to learn how to decorate your mantle, you might look for great examples on Pinterest and then try to make yours look like that.

Similarly, kids can look at the work of published authors to see how a pro writes.

Mentor texts are published pieces that serve as a good example of the type of writing you’re helping your students to produce.

If you’re teaching how-to writing, find books about making crafts, cooking, or other DIY topics.  If you’re teaching report writing, look at nonfiction books.

• Read these books (or parts of them) to your students.
• Talk as a class about the special features you notice.
• Make a list of these features (how-to books have numbered steps, pictures to match, sequence, etc.)

Demonstrate

Cooking shows are popular because it’s easy to watch how a good cook puts together a recipe and then do the same yourself. Writing demonstrations are similar.

One method for teaching writing is writing demonstrations. Students watch as a proficient writer writes, and thinks aloud, similar to an audience watching a chef on a cooking show.

Write in front of your students and think aloud as you’re doing it.  Thinking aloud is a research-based teaching strategy .  You are the proficient writer in the room and you want your students to begin modeling their thinking processes after yours.

Some writing skills you might demonstrate are:

• brainstorming topics to write about
• creating a plan for writing
• orally rehearsing sentences and then writing them down
• stretching out sounds in words for spelling
• rereading and editing writing
• looking for places to add more interesting vocabulary
• making a final copy that incorporates editing and revisions

Use Sentence Starters

Staring at a blank page can be so intimidating!

Help kids get started with a list of possible sentence starters. Here’s an example list of sentence starters that work well for opinion writing .

Join my weekly newsletter and as a bonus, you’ll get the sentence starter page pictured above. Just click here to download and subscribe .

Color Coding

One method for teaching writing is using color coding between the plan and the draft.

(you can find the pictured graphic organizer HERE )

Use color-coding to make writing organization obvious and to connect a student’s plan to their draft.

• Assign a different color to each element of a piece.
• Mark whatever planning graphic organizer you’re using with these colors.
• During drafting, underline the sentences for each section with the appropriate color.

This technique helps students make sure nothing is left out and that everything is in the right order

Integrate Vocabulary

One of the things we know about teaching vocabulary is that it’s not enough to talk about a word once.  It needs to be seen, heard, and used several times before it is mastered.

Writing is the perfect place to incorporate some vocabulary instruction.

Choose two or three words that might be useful to students for the topic they are writing about.  Teach these words, give example sentences, and share sentences where students were able to work them in.

You can either teach the words before students write their rough draft or teach them before students revise.  You may want students to keep a record of these words in a notebook.

Use a Rubric

There’s no point in making kids guess what they’re aiming for with their writing.

Research shows that when students have criteria against which to judge their writing, they begin to internalize that criteria and use it when they write new pieces.

Try teaching critique lessons where you share a few short pieces of writing with different strengths and weaknesses and evaluate them with students using a rubric.

Talk about what made a piece successful and what could be better about it.  Invite students to use the successful techniques in their own writing.  Click on the picture to get a free copy of a personal narrative rubric that I like to use.

Peer Conferencing

Many students find working with a partner to be very motivating.

It’s important to carefully structure peer writing conferencing because it can get out of hand easily.

Set a specific goal such as helping each other check for capital letters at the beginning of every sentence, rereading to make sure each sentence makes sense, or looking for words that could be traded out for something more interesting.

Another way to structure peer conferencing is to use the “Love and a Wish” system.  Students read each other’s writing.  Then they share one thing they loved about it and one thing they wished.  For example, maybe they loved how their partner described the taste of their birthday cake and they wished there was more about the games that were played at the party.

Create an Incentive

Taking a piece of writing from the planning process all the way to a final draft is a lot of work.  Find a way to celebrate that work to keep students motivated.

A chance to share their work is motivating to students. You can build in sharing while you’re roving the classroom.  At the mid-point or the end of the lesson, have a few students share how they revised a sentence to add an interesting word or the great hook that they chose.

You can give students time to share their work with a neighbor.  This way everyone gets to share in a short amount of time.

Allow students to share writing in those 5-minute blocks of time you find every now and then when you finished something else early.

A favorite writing incentive in my classroom was the “publishing party.”  After a 5 week writing unit, each student chose their best piece and we all sat in a circle and listened to each other’s work.

At the end, we toasted to our hard work with a small cup of apple juice.  Parents would share with me that this simple celebration really motivated their child to work hard in writing so they would have something great to read to the class.

If you’re looking for resources to help you teach writing, check out the classroom-tested products HERE :

Follow my literacy board on Pinterest for more ideas!  

Author:  Hannah Braun

Hannah Braun is a former teacher with 8 years of experience in the classroom and a master's degree in early childhood education. She designs engaging, organized classroom resources for 1st-3rd grade teachers.

Just found your site and teacherspayteachers products. Love it all! Laughed out loud at your posters and comments on students. Thought I was the only one who noticed (was confused/irritated/baffled) at some of the things students think up to do with school equipment and behaviors. Nice to know we can laugh about it all! Thank you.

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Teacher’s Guide: Tips and Tricks in Teaching Creative Writing

John anderson.

• February 6, 2019

Creative writing is one of the most enjoyable forms of writing that students learn in school. Unlike in the case of academic and formal theme writing, students are able to express their creativity in such writing classes. They can craft stories, describe characters and settings, and share with the readers their thoughts and ideas. Through creative writing, they can share their experiences, make their own world, design their heroes and villains, and create and solve conflicts for their characters.

Teachers play a big role in encouraging their students to enjoy writing. As the captain of the ship, you should lead and inspire them to enjoy the craft and later on, be good at it. However, how can you be an effective creative writing teacher? Here are some tips and tricks for you:

As with teaching any subject, planning is of great importance when teaching writing. Plan ahead to make sure that you and your class will be on the right track. Schedule your lessons and arrange topics chronologically. Start with the basics such as plot and character development. Look for materials to supplement your lessons. There are plenty of creative writing worksheets online . Make use of them as part of your students writing activities—either as seatwork or homework.

Set themes and topics

It also helps to line up themes and topics for your students to draw inspiration from. Browse through magazines and books to get ideas. List down topics as your “seed ideas” and arrange them according to your scheduled lessons. This should help students use their imagination as they work on subjects that may not be familiar to them.

Challenge your students

Test your students’ skills by giving them writing challenges. One good example is writing a six-word story. Writing stories can be daunting, especially when you’re required to write at least three pages, for instance. But the thing is that it’s harder to write when you’re limited to just a few words. This kind of challenge will make your students get those creative juices oozing for good.

Encourage competition

Friendly competition is great for every class. Encourage your students to step up their game by giving them activities that will earn them points and bragging rights. Give them contests such as character designing and making their own story endings, as well as homework like word bank and journaling. Give them points for their output and give recognition to top scorers. Remember that creativity is subjective, so create a simple rubric to assess their written works.

Allow review and feedback

Let your students review the works of their classmates. You can group your class into small groups wherein they can share their stories and writing pieces.  This should help your young writers to gain confidence in what they’re doing and listen to other people’s comments and suggestions to better their skills. At the same time, it helps you gauge the competencies and weaknesses of your students through the eyes of other audience.

The best thing about teaching a subject like creative writing is that you don’t just get to teach, you also learn in the process. It is truly a great experience seeing your students get better at writing. Who knows, you could very well be training the next Hemingway or perhaps the next J.K. Rowling.

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Innovative Strategies for Teaching Writing Skills

Writing skills are essential for student success in many academic and professional settings. Discover innovative strategies for teaching writing skills, from using mentor texts to incorporating technology and multimedia into writing activities.

Enhance Academic and Professional Success with Innovative Strategies for Teaching Writing Skills

Writing skills play a crucial role in students' academic and professional success. Whether it's crafting a persuasive essay or drafting a business proposal, the ability to communicate effectively through writing is a valuable skill. As educators, it is our responsibility to equip students with the necessary tools and strategies to excel in this area. In this blog post, we will explore innovative approaches to teaching writing skills that will engage and empower students.

1. Utilize Mentor Texts: One effective strategy for teaching writing skills is to use mentor texts. Mentor texts are published pieces of writing that serve as models for students. By analyzing and deconstructing these texts, students can gain insights into various writing techniques, such as sentence structure, vocabulary usage, and organization. Encourage students to identify and discuss the strengths and techniques employed by the authors. This not only enhances their understanding of effective writing but also inspires them to apply these strategies in their own work.

2. Incorporate Technology and Multimedia: In today's digital age, technology and multimedia can greatly enhance the teaching of writing skills. Introduce students to online writing tools and platforms that provide interactive exercises and prompts. These resources can help students develop their writing skills in a fun and engaging way. Additionally, encourage students to incorporate multimedia elements, such as images, videos, and audio recordings, into their writing. This not only adds depth and creativity to their work but also allows them to explore different modes of expression.

3. Provide Authentic Writing Opportunities: To truly master writing skills, students need authentic opportunities to practice and apply what they have learned. Create a classroom environment that fosters real-world writing experiences. For example, organize writing contests, publish a class newsletter, or collaborate with other classrooms on joint writing projects. By engaging in meaningful writing tasks, students can develop a sense of purpose and audience, which motivates them to produce their best work.

4. Foster Peer Collaboration and Feedback: Collaboration and feedback are essential components of the writing process. Encourage students to work in pairs or small groups to brainstorm ideas, provide constructive criticism, and revise their writing. Peer collaboration not only enhances students' writing skills but also promotes communication and teamwork. Additionally, provide opportunities for students to receive feedback from you, the teacher. Offer specific and actionable suggestions for improvement, focusing on both content and mechanics.

In conclusion, teaching writing skills requires innovative approaches that engage and empower students. By utilizing mentor texts, incorporating technology and multimedia, providing authentic writing opportunities, and fostering peer collaboration and feedback, educators can equip students with the necessary tools to excel in their writing endeavors. Remember, strong writing skills are not only crucial for academic success but also for future professional endeavors. Let's inspire and guide our students to become confident and effective writers.

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12 ideas for teaching creative writing

Teaching creative writing to kids can be one of the most rewarding parts of teaching the English curriculum. But with so many statutory requirements to hit in a portfolio of writing, it can be difficult to capture truly creative writing as well as instil enthusiasm for the art.

Some of your class will really enjoy creative writing from scratch. For others, this will be a daunting experience. We have gathered together a collection of simple ideas for teaching creative writing to help your pupils smash writing tasks.

Creative writing tips for teachers

• Use a workshop-style environment
• Show your class how it’s done
• Draw up a storyboard
• Encourage book reading
• Re-write a known story
• Show, don’t tell
• Inspire them with video
• Deconstruct characters
• Give your pupils freedom
• Use story-starters and prompts
• Elaborate with a story generator
• Get the children to take creative writing home

1. Use a workshop-style environment

Separate your class into groups or tables, each group will then be able to choose what they work on. Some may look to write fiction pieces and use ideas around storytelling. Another group could focus on word games, spelling and puzzle-solving. There could even just be a group for reading stories and learning the craft!

All children are able to work in groups, but each pupil will have one-to-one time with you too. As long as assignments and tasks are rotated, children will find their favourite part and be more engaged as a result. Working this way can also lead to competitions and collaborative creative writing work.

2. Show your class how it’s done

The adage is ‘practise what you preach’. When it comes to creative writing, this means you should be showing the class what the process is.

Doing live creative writing sessions for your class can give them perspective on how to build a story effectively. More importantly, it gives them chance to see how it’s OK to make mistakes, how to take criticism and that they shouldn’t be afraid to create whatever they feel they want to. You could even get your more able (and confident!) pupils to live write on the board for the class to gather inspiration from; pupil modelling can be a really fantastic assessment for learning activity.

3. Draw up a storyboard

Some visual cues might be the key to unlocking greater creativity in your pupils. Instead of writing out a story, why not begin with a storyboard? It doesn’t need to be a work of art – simple stick people will do the job.

Once you’ve drawn out the basis of your story, you can then start to write down more detail to really flesh out their story.

4. Encourage book reading

If there is one place anyone can go to experience good storytelling, it’s in books. Reading brings a whole host of benefits to children form an educational standpoint – many of which apply to creative writing.

To increase vocabulary, improve creativity and enflame imaginations (plus a whole lot more), we should always be looking for more reading opportunities for pupils in class. Beyond the classroom, encourage them to do as much reading as possible at home too.

5. Re-write a known story

If you’re struggling for ideas, why not take inspiration from one of the countless legendary stories already out there. Give a classic story a twist and ask the class to elaborate on it:

• Three Billy Goats Gruff are the ones under the bridge, and you’re trying to cross it
• At the top of Jack’s Beanstalk is Mars
• Aladdin rubs his lamp, but what are his three wishes?
• The three bears are the ones sneaking into Goldilocks’ house

6. Show, don’t tell

It’s a tenant of good storytelling across many different mediums. The idea of show, don’t tell means the writer should avoid explaining every aspect of what a character is feeling or thinking and instead focus on different ways of revealing that information in the story.

For example, give your class some basic information like “the boy was sad”, and ask to write a sentence that would display that information more creatively. It could become, “the boy’s heart sank, his head bowed and he sniffled as the tears began to fall.”

This way, the reader is able to unravel the emotions involved in the story themselves, rather than being told.

7. Inspire them with video

YouTube is a treasure trove of learning resources and other helpful content that can boost a pupil’s creative writing capability. With a quick search, you’ll find plenty of interviews with famed writers sharing their experiences in the job.

Use these to dig a little deeper into the mind of a writer. What is there process for coming up with ideas? What are the challenges they face? This type of content can provide key takeaways that pupils can bring into their next creative writing task.

8. Deconstruct characters

A simple but effective method for getting into the routine of character building involves writing down what makes them tick. Take a famous character from a book or a famous children’s TV show. Split a piece of paper into a grid, and label them with things like “what makes them happy”, “what makes them angry” “How would they react in a certain situation?”

Then as a class fill out the grid. You could use them method when a pupil comes up with a new character for their story, helping them to get in the correct mindsight for creating characters.

9. Give your pupils freedom

There will be a lot of children in your class who thrive when given the freedom to write. Always remember to set aside time for your pupils to have an open-ended opportunity to write, allowing them to express their favourite topics. If it’s too open for some children, then proposing a particular topic for this time can help too.

10. Use story-starters and prompts

Story-starters or prompts are great for getting the creative juices flowing. It helps pupils to avoid the dreaded ‘writer’s block’. We’ve got a whole load of story starters for KS1 and KS2 creative writers, but here are just a few to get the juices flowing:

• It was there and then it was gone! As quick as a flash…
• This was it! I now had the power to change anything.
• A million pounds sat there in the suitcase. “What should we do with it?” I said.
• The three friends set out on their journey, with nothing but each other to help them for what lied ahead.
• The car lurched down the road when suddenly a thud came from below.
• The tap on my shoulder woke me. “Shhh” she said with a finger pressed to her lips. “Follow me.”

11. Elaborate with a story generator

Generate ideas and get a story rolling with a tried and tested method: the story generator. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to do it:

• Find three bags
• Create three lists: one for characters (a footballer, a dog, an astronaut etc), one for scenes (an unknown planet, a bedroom, a park etc) and one for the situation (looking for a lost coin, meets a talking dog, during a big thunderstorm etc)
• Cut out each of the ideas and group them together in the bags. You have three bags filled with dozens of possibilities for different stories.
• Ask a pupil to reach into each bag so they then have a character, a scene and a situation. This is the basis of their story.

12. Get the children to take creative writing home

The home environment will be a more comfortable or possibly, a more inspiring place for children to write their stories. Encouraging parents to get onside with this can sometimes be a battle, but one worth fighting. Sharing their stories and creations across different audiences is a valuable experience for children, whether that be in class, at home or safely online. The perfect flipped classroom experience!

Amber Vaccianna

Hope Education writer

Advice & Inspiration | Primary

9 october 2020.

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How to teach writing to Grade 1 kids: New strategies for teachers and parents

Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Education, Western University

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Perry Douglas Klein receives funding from The Social Sciences and Humanties Research Council of Canada

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Writing is a craft that is vital for both communicating and learning . However, many children struggle to learn to write. For most, their difficulties persist throughout elementary school unless they get help. As recently as 2018, there was very little research on how to teach Grade 1s effectively .

However, recent research shows how teachers can help Grade 1s make a strong start on writing. Parents have a vital role to play in laying a foundation for early writing success.

Many parents have likely heard children say, “I don’t know what to write.” Teaching children strategies for writing tackles this problem head-on.

Breaking writing down into steps

In 2019, a team of Spanish and British researchers published one of the first experiments on teaching writing strategies in Grade 1 . They explored how a child can learn to write a story by asking themselves a series of questions: When did it happen? Where did it happen? Who is the story about? What did they do? What happened? How did it end? These questions help the child to generate and organize their ideas.

To help children remember this writing strategy, teachers in the study used a picture of a mountain with a path that led past six houses — one for each question. The teachers discussed the strategy, modelled how to use it and wrote together with the class. After instruction, the children wrote stories that were higher in quality, longer and more coherent.

Strategies work

The value of teaching writing strategies in Grade 1 has been confirmed by additional studies that examine teaching specific kinds of writing: Procedural writing (instructions for someone on how to do something) , and opinion writing (short essays meant to persuade someone of something) . In this writing research, teachers combined strategy instruction with discussions, picture books and dramatization.

And in our own recent research, we found that strategy instruction is effective for Grade 1 students across the range of writing achievement levels: low, medium and high . These Grade 1 studies join over 100 previous studies with students in higher grades in showing that teaching writing strategies works .

Printing, handwriting, spelling

Recent research also provides renewed support for the seemingly old-fashioned skill of printing. Grade 1s who can print accurately and quickly are able to create better and longer stories and reports . Teaching printing helps students to create better stories . Despite over 70 previous studies on the benefits of teaching printing and cursive writing , systematic teaching and assessment of these skills has declined in some curricula.

Read more: Writing and reading starts with children's hands-on play

Spelling is another traditional skill, the importance of which has been confirmed by recent research. Better spellers create better and longer stories, while poor spellers struggle with composing , and Grade 1 spelling affects the development of composition in later years.

Spelling education works best if it is formal, including, for example, lessons and practice activities . Additionally, teaching writing strategies combined with spelling and printing is more effective than teaching each of these skills alone .

Parents can help children practice spelling at home. Teachers and parents can also show children the “invented spelling” strategy of saying a word slowly, stretching out the sounds, and printing a letter (or letter combinations, such as “th”) for each sound. This will lead to some errors, but in kindergarten and Grade 1, invented spelling is an important driver of spelling development .

New understanding of Grade 1

This new understanding of the importance of Grade 1 is beginning to change writing education . In the past, many schools in Canada and the United States waited for struggling readers and writers to reach the middle elementary grades . Then, they were assessed by a school psychologist. If they were diagnosed with a learning disability, they were placed in a special education class.

However, in a new approach, response to intervention, teachers use evidence-based methods (like strategy instruction) to teach the whole class. They assess students regularly based on their daily writing, and if a child is below grade level, they receive help in a small group .

This approach is not yet common. However, it is almost certainly coming to some provinces in reading education . Reading education and writing education are intertwined, so we can expect the same approach to follow in writing.

Laying the foundations

The foundation for writing success is ideally being supported at home before children start kindergarten.

Parents can ask children to tell them stories, print the stories for them, then read them aloud for the child. They can teach children simple skills like forming letters and printing their name.

Parents can also practice printing with children at home; this is especially valuable for struggling writers . They can help children to write things that are important to them, like birthday cards for family members .

Read more: To help children learn how to read in the pandemic, encourage writing messages as part of play

Parents can also encourage children to read and write independently . Once children begin to write, parents can be their best audience, praising their efforts and the good qualities of their writing, and making suggestions to help with ideas, printing, and spelling .

When children begin school, and into Grade 1, parents can watch for red flags in their child’s writing development. During Grade 1, the average student learns to print the letters of the alphabet legibly and fluently, spell one syllable words the way that they sound (cat, game) and spell common short words that are not spelled the way that they sound (you, they). They also learn to write a story a few sentences in length about a personal experience .

If your child is missing these basic skills, don’t wait and see — talk with your child’s teacher and make a plan to help them succeed.

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Planning Writing Lessons for the Early Elementary Grades

Teachers can provide thoughtful instruction that supports the sustained development of young students’ literacy skills.

Often, attempting to plan effective and purposeful writing instruction raises many questions: What does lesson planning look like? How will I manage so many students who may be in different stages of their writing? How often should they be editing and revising? The list doesn’t stop there.

By utilizing on-demand writing for assessment and long-range writing for scaffolded practice of applying various writing techniques, teachers can approach their instruction with intentional and tailored lessons that meet the needs of the learners in the classroom, as well as help students develop self-regulated behaviors when crafting a piece of text.

On-Demand Writing

Just like any area of instruction, assessment is critical for knowing what the students’ strengths and areas of growth are, and on-demand writing is how teachers can gather that evidence. An on-demand piece of writing simply means that the teacher provides a specific prompt for the student to write to for the purpose of anecdotal data. For example, let’s say a second-grade teacher prepares for a narrative writing cycle. In the first couple of days before the cycle begins, they’ll ask students to write a narrative about something fun they’ve experienced (with their family or a friend). 

After the prompt is given, students get one or two days to write and are provided with all necessary tools to carry out the process of developing a piece of writing without additional modeling or instruction. Effective tools might include graphic organizers, writing paper, tools for editing, and a writing checklist. However, the teacher will not model how to use the tools. The teacher is informally assessing if the students know how to use these resources to develop a story.

After students complete their piece, the teacher collects them for analysis. It is critically important to determine realistic expectations for what writing should look like throughout various points of the year, so creating a common rubric as a grade level is a great way to stay on the same page for analyzing the assessment. 

Writing growth, similar to reading, happens along a continuum of skills. At the beginning of the year, a second grader can’t be expected to write like an end-of-the-year second grader because they haven’t been taught the grade-level skills necessary to do so yet. On-demand benchmark assessments along the way will gradually raise the expectation of what that student should be able to do. Websites such as Reading Rockets and Achieve the Core provide useful anchor examples of real student writing in various genres that provide annotated explanations of students’ overall writing ability and possible next steps for instruction.

As students engage in daily lessons about crafting a narrative within the instructional cycle of a long-range writing piece, another on-demand prompt may be given at the halfway point of the cycle to track growth and drive future instruction. This could be the same prompt as before or a prompt given in response to a story or passage the student has read.  

It’s important to remember that it’s easy to fall into the trap of using writing prompts daily for students to produce writing simply because it’s easy to manage. If we use this approach exclusively, we rob our students of the opportunity to dive deeply into producing self-chosen, elaborate pieces full of voice and author’s craft.

Long-Range Writing

Long-range pieces give students the autonomy to choose their own writing topic while the teacher assists in walking them through the process. This type of instruction instills the executive-functioning behaviors needed when students are asked to write a piece on demand. When considering how to implement this type of writing instruction, it can be overwhelming. Breaking down long-range instruction using the following components allows for a more manageable approach.

Keep your lesson mini: A mini lesson is 15 to 20 minutes long and organized in a gradual release format, and it allows the teacher to model a specific, focused lesson. For example, narrative writing could be broken into the following mini lessons for a beginning-of-the-year cycle for second grade: introduce and describe a setting, introduce and describe the character, edit on the go (this means to stop and edit before we add more writing), describe the first event in the narrative, introduce a problem, etc. Essentially, each lesson will invite students to add to their story one chunk at a time.

Model, provide independent practice: The teacher begins by modeling one learning target using a well-crafted organizer . An effective organizer teaches students that each genre has a specific structure. As learners begin to recognize the pattern in text structure, they can replicate it when assessed in on-demand pieces. For example, the teacher can start by using a text that clearly introduces and describes the setting, and then read that page out loud and ask students what they notice about how the author introduced the setting.  

Next, students are invited to help the teacher write a setting to a story together by offering verbal suggestions. The teacher records the students’ ideas and writes an example introduction in the organizer. Then students think about an idea for an introduction of a setting on their own and are prompted to talk to a partner about their story. The students verbally rehearse what they plan to write, as this provides them an opportunity to organize their thoughts and prepares them to get started as soon as they are released to write independently, using the same organizer that the teacher used to model the mini lesson.  

The benefit of this approach is that it gives the teacher time to provide specific feedback over the same crafting element. Having every student write their complete thoughts directly in the organizer in a chunked manner allows for a better visual of where to correct capitalization and punctuation. Essentially, each lesson should invite students to write one or two complete sentences that can be quickly edited before adding the next part of the story.  

Share and reflect: Close each lesson by bringing students back together so that they have an opportunity to share what they’ve produced. This time celebrates students’ creativity, as well as giving them an opportunity to reflect on how they can improve their writing.   

Both on-demand writing and long-range writing are vital in developing confident writers across various genres. It’s important to approach them with a cyclical scope and sequence that allows students to learn the craft, structure, and development of narrative, informative, and opinion styles of writing. By scaffolding and supporting students’ growth in each genre of writing, learners will begin to automatically apply these techniques more independently as the year progresses because of the solid foundation that has been built. 

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15 Best Literacy Strategies for Teachers to Use in the Classroom

1. Phonics Instruction

2. graphic organizers, 3. think-pair-share, 4. vocabulary instruction, 5. story mapping, 6. kwl charts (know, want to know, learned), 7. interactive read-alouds, 8. guided reading, 9. writing workshops, 10. literature circles.

Today, literacy is not just about learning to read and write ; it’s a crucial tool that opens doors to a world of knowledge and opportunities. It’s the foundation upon which we build our ability to communicate, understand, and interact with the world around us. It is the cornerstone that supports all other learning.

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But how do we ensure every student learns to read and write, loves the process, and excels in it? This is where literacy strategies for teachers come into play. 

In the modern classroom, literacy strategies are essential for several reasons. They help cater to diverse learning styles , engage students more effectively, and promote a deeper understanding of the material.

These strategies are vital in an era of abundant information and attention spans are challenged. They equip teachers with innovative methods to make reading and writing more interactive and meaningful. 

In this blog, we will talk about some of the best literacy strategies that can make a significant difference in your classroom!

Literacy Strategy Definition

Literacy strategies are various methods and approaches used in teaching reading and writing. These are not just standard teaching practices but innovative, interactive, and tailored techniques designed to improve literacy skills. They include activities like group discussions, interactive games , and creative writing exercises, all part of a broader set of literacy instruction strategies.

The Role of Literacy Strategies in Enhancing Reading and Writing Skills

Teaching literacy strategies enhance students’ reading and writing skills. These strategies help break down complex texts, making them more understandable and relatable for students. They encourage students to think critically about what they read and express their thoughts clearly in writing. Teachers can use literacy strategies to address different learning styles, helping students find their path to literacy success.

15 Best Literacy Strategies for Teachers

Phonics instruction is fundamental in building foundational reading skills , especially for young learners. This method teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds , helping them decode words. Through phonics, students learn to sound out words, which is crucial for reading fluency and comprehension. Phonics instruction can be made fun and interactive with games, songs, and puzzles .

You can begin here:

Graphic organizers are powerful visual tools that aid in better comprehension and organization of information. As part of literacy practice examples, they help students visually map out ideas and relationships between concepts. This can include charts, diagrams, or concept maps. Using graphic organizers, teachers can help students structure their thoughts, making complex ideas more accessible and understandable. It’s an effective way to break down reading materials or organize writing drafts visually.

Think-pair-share is an essential literacy strategy that fosters collaborative learning. In this activity, students first think about a question or topic individually, then pair up with a classmate to discuss their thoughts, and finally share their ideas with the larger group. This strategy encourages active participation and communication, allowing students to learn from each other. It’s a simple yet powerful way to engage students in critical thinking and discussion.

Vocabulary instruction is crucial in expanding language comprehension. This strategy involves teaching students new words and phrases in terms of their definitions, context, and usage. Effective vocabulary instruction can include word mapping , sentence creation , and word games. By enriching students’ vocabulary , teachers equip them with the tools to understand and articulate ideas more effectively, enhancing their overall literacy.

Story mapping is a technique where students break down the narrative elements of a story, such as characters, setting, plot, and conflict. This strategy helps in enhancing comprehension and analytical skills. By visually organizing the elements of a story, students can better understand the structure and themes of the text. It’s an engaging way to dissect stories and can be done individually or as a group activity .

KWL charts are an effective tool for structuring learning objectives. This strategy involves creating a chart with three columns: What students already Know, What they Want to know, and What they have Learned. This approach helps activate prior knowledge, set learning goals , and reflect on new information. It’s a great way to engage students in the learning process from start to finish, making them active participants in their education. KWL Charts can be used across various subjects, making them versatile and essential in the classroom.

Interactive read-alouds are a cornerstone among literacy instructional strategies. In this activity, the teacher reads a story aloud, using expressive tones and gestures to bring the story to life. This method engages students in dynamic storytelling , sparking their imagination and interest. It’s an essential literacy strategy that enhances listening skills, vocabulary, and comprehension. Teachers can pause to ask questions, encouraging students to think and predict, making it an interactive and inclusive learning experience.

Guided reading is a tailored approach that addresses the diverse reading levels within a classroom. In this strategy, teachers work with small groups of students, providing focused reading instruction at their specific level of development. This allows for more personalized attention and support, helping students progress at their own pace.

Writing workshops are a dynamic way to foster creative expression among students. These workshops provide a platform for students to write , share, and receive feedback on their work. It’s an interactive process where students learn to develop their writing style, voice, and technique. Writing Workshops encourage creativity, critical thinking, and peer collaboration, making them a vital part of literacy development.

Literature circles are a collaborative and student-centered approach to reading and discussing books. In these circles, small groups of students choose and read a book together, then meet to discuss it, often taking on different roles like discussion leader or summarizer. This strategy promotes discussion, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of literature. It’s an engaging way for students to explore texts and share their perspectives, enhancing their analytical and communication skills.

11. Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a teaching method that provides students with step-by-step guidance to help them better understand new concepts. This approach breaks down learning into manageable chunks, gradually moving students towards stronger comprehension and greater independence. Scaffolding can include techniques like asking leading questions, providing examples, or offering partial solutions. It’s especially effective in building confidence and skill in students, as they feel supported throughout their learning journey.

12. Word Walls

Word walls are a visual and interactive way to display vocabulary in the classroom . As one of the essential literacy strategy examples, they help students learn new words and reinforce their spelling and meaning. Teachers can add words related to current lessons or themes, encouraging students to use and explore these words in their writing and speaking. Word walls are educational and serve as a reference tool that students can continually interact with.

13. Reader’s Theater

Reader’s theater is an engaging literacy activity that combines reading and performance. In this strategy, students read scripts aloud, focusing on expression rather than memorization or props. This method helps improve reading fluency, comprehension, and confidence as students practice reading with emotion and emphasis. Reader’s Theater is also a fun way to bring literature to life and encourage a love for reading and storytelling.

14. Dramatization of Text

Dramatization of text involves bringing stories and texts to life through acting and role-play. This strategy allows students to interpret and enact narratives, deepening their understanding of the characters, plot, and themes. It’s an interactive way to engage students with literature, encouraging them to explore texts creatively and collaboratively. Dramatization can enhance comprehension, empathy, and public speaking skills.

15. Inquiry-Based Learning

Inquiry-Based Learning is a student-centered approach that promotes curiosity-driven research and exploration. In this method, learning starts with questions, problems, or scenarios rather than simply presenting facts. Students are encouraged to investigate topics, ask questions , and discover answers through research and discussion. This strategy fosters critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and a love for learning .

These literacy strategies for teachers offer a diverse and dynamic toolkit for teachers to enhance reading, writing, and comprehension skills in their classrooms. By incorporating these methods, educators can create a more engaging, inclusive, and effective learning environment , paving the way for students to become confident and proficient learners.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the key benefits of using literacy strategies in the classroom.

Literacy strategies enhance classroom engagement, improve comprehension, and foster critical thinking skills. They make learning more interactive and meaningful, helping students to connect with the material more deeply.

How can teachers effectively integrate literacy strategies into existing curricula?

Teachers can integrate literacy strategies by aligning them with current lesson objectives, using them as complementary tools for existing content. Start small, incorporate strategies gradually, and tailor them to fit the lesson’s context.

Are these literacy strategies suitable for all age groups?

Yes, these strategies can be adapted for different age groups and learning levels. The key is to modify the complexity and delivery of the strategy to suit the developmental stage and abilities of the students.

How do digital literacy strategies for teachers differ from traditional ones?

Digital literacy strategies incorporate technology, focusing on skills like navigating online information, digital communication, and critical evaluation of online content, which are essential in the digital age.

Can literacy strategies be used in subjects other than language arts?

Absolutely, literacy strategies can be applied cross-curricularly. For example, graphic organizers can be used in science for hypothesis mapping, or story mapping can be used in history to outline events.

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