I think that writing is an important activity that every student should do every day.
Some students approach writing as though being forced to do push ups – it’s hard, may feel like punishment, they may even try to get out of it. However, if you do a push up every day, it gets easier each day and the same is true of writing.
Some students approach writing as the opportunity to eat ice cream and they are happy to do it every day – a little or a lot, they would rather do a writing piece than something else. Yet even these students will almost always have something about writing that they do not like.
By having students write every day, you develop endurance and skills in your reluctant writers and you encourage and release the ones who enjoy writing. Writing is an academic skill that becomes increasingly important in school and are vital for high school success and can often make or break a college/university student’s achievement. Let’s build their skills so each child can be successful. Here are some tips:
1. Vary the length of the writing assignments. Including long, medium and short writes into weekly assignments creates a variety that allows for students to ‘work out’ their writing muscles without becoming onerous.
2. Include writing in different subject areas. Writing can be done in LA, Bible, science, social studies, health, even PE and math. If you think to include one writing experience each day, it could be from different subject areas each day.
3. Writing comes in different forms: informational (non-fiction), personal (about own experiences, dreams,thoughts), creative (fiction, making up own stories including retelling familiar fiction stories, poetry), and visual/graphic (posters, media presentations, cartoons, etc.). I am always looking to see all kinds of writing, rather than just one or two. For older students, informational becomes expository, personal becomes narrative, creative becomes descriptive, visual/graphic stays the same and an extra type of writing is added, the persuasive essay.
When students only write once a week, it’s like going to the gym once a week – helpful and yet not any easier each time. When students only write one form/style of writing, they only increase their performance in that one area – the different writing types are incorporating different skills.
Finally, spelling and grammar exercises are not considered writing pieces: they are skills that help a student to write more effectively. Writing is intended to be meaningful for the writer and the reader.
Try to identify what your child likes to write and then make sure that is one of the forms at least one day each week of their writing assignment.
For length, think of the grade-level work your child is doing. As a rule of thumb, a short writing assignment is one sentence per year of schooling (grade 5 times 1 equals 5 sentences for a short write). For medium length, consider roughly one *paragraph per year (0 for kindergarten, 1 for 1, 2 for 2, 3 for 3, THEN 3 **quality paragraphs for 4-5, 4 quality paragraphs for 6, 5 quality paragraphs for 7-9). For long writes, it would be longer for each grade, though not expected for K-3.
* sometimes students will not write in paragraph form (for writing that include dialogue, story retelling, etc) or because they are not sure how to write in that format yet, so keep in mind that approximately every 4-6 sentences would be the equivalent of one paragraph
**quality paragraphs include a topic sentence, supporting details, summative statement
