Teaching Writing: Grades 4-6

Lesson 1

Getting Started: Writing Basics

Begin a journey through the writing process with a look at your fellow travelers: your students! This lesson will discuss the types of writers that emerge in grades 4-6 and show you how to encourage and motivate them. You'll also explore the basics of teaching writing by learning how to create an engaging writing task with a specific audience and purpose. At the end of the lesson, you'll pack a writing suitcase to organize your materials and learn how to create a writer-friendly classroom.

The Writing Process: Part 1

Learn the importance of modeling your writing skills as you teach your students about the writing process. You'll start with an overview of the process and then focus on the first two steps in your writing journey: prewriting and drafting. Some intriguing superheroes will help your students learn effective prewriting techniques like brainstorming, freewriting, and mapping. Finally, you'll look at a friendly monster who will help you teach essay structure.

The Writing Process: Part 2

In this lesson, you'll continue your travels through the writing process with a study of the last three steps: revising, editing, and publishing. You'll learn how to help students become confident peer revisers as they check papers for content and clarity while still respecting the author's sense of ownership. Next, the lesson will discuss how you can help students focus on writing mechanics during the editing step. In both revising and editing, you'll encourage your students to collaborate, coach, and correct. Finally, you'll find ways to let your students share their writing as their voices are fully realized in the publishing step.

Ways to Strengthen Writing

It's time to get out your barbells because this lesson is about strengthening your students' writing. You'll focus on specific strategies for constructing intriguing sentences that vary in length and style. To be strong writers, your students will need some nourishment, so you'll learn how to use a submarine sandwich to teach paragraph structure. Using this formula, your students will become proficient at writing topic sentences, supporting sentences with transitions, and concluding sentences. Finally, you'll see how to use technology as a tool for strengthening writing.

Enhancing Writing Instruction With Trade Books

Reading and writing have a natural relationship. When students connect those skills, they strengthen both abilities and enhance their learning. In this lesson, you'll explore how to foster an eagerness for writing and teach writing skills using children's trade books. Then, you'll discover and develop writing prompts that will allow your students to effectively communicate their understanding of literature.

Narrative Writing

"Once upon a time . . ." Remember the wonderful books you read as a child? This lesson will help you bring that "once upon a time" magic into your students' lives as you help them see that good stories aren't just found in books—they're in every single person as well. The topic is narrative writing, and you'll explore the skills students need to tell stories. You'll learn how to help students create memorable characters, vivid settings, and descriptive plots. Finally, you'll consider ways to expand your students' writing repertoire using different writing genres.

Expository Writing

Can you count how many research papers you've been asked to write? At some point, your students will certainly be given this assignment, so now's the time to teach them about expository writing. Expository writing is simply writing that explains or informs. In this lesson, you'll start by looking at three expository elements: focus, support, and structure. Next, you'll find ways to teach your students how to conduct research and take notes. Finally, you'll learn how to help them organize all of the information into an exceptional report.

Persuasive Writing

Young students often feel unheard in an adult-dominated society, but with persuasive writing, they come to know that what they think matters and what they have to say can make a difference. That's a powerful motivation to write! In this lesson, you'll learn how to walk your students through the prewriting step, where they'll choose a topic, decide on a position statement, and research evidence that supports their view. Next, you'll help them learn to hook their readers in their introduction, use different persuasive appeals in the body of their essay, and leave a memorable impact with their conclusion. Finally, you'll help them avoid the pitfalls of certain fallacies that can undermine their efforts.

Writing Across the Curriculum

Writing isn't just for English class! It's a valuable tool to help your students learn other topics more deeply. In this lesson, as you explore writing across the curriculum, you'll learn how to provide plenty of writing opportunities in every subject area. You'll explore summary writing and journal writing as ways to write about a subject. Then, you'll move on to writing projects that are unique for each content area. Finally, you'll explore some engaging ideas for writing about famous people in any content area.

A Trait-Based Approach to Writing

Good, effective writing lets readers enjoy the journey with the writer, moving them toward a clear destination while blending the author's voice with the reader's emotions. The 6 + 1 Trait Writing method helps students create a reciprocal relationship with their readers. In this lesson, you'll learn practical strategies for teaching the six writing traits: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Then, you'll discover the "plus 1" and ways to make your students' writing presentations appealing. When students can pull all these traits together, they'll have writing that makes a memorable impression on their readers!

Writer's Workshop

This lesson will combine all the writing strategies you've learned and see how they fit into a Writer's Workshop. You'll be excited to discover how students can use the writing process, learn writing skills, practice different applications, and work collaboratively using the Writer's Workshop model. Your study of this teaching approach will be divided into three components: the mini-lesson, the small group and independent work time, and the sharing session. An example of Writer's Workshop in action will help you visualize its use in your own classroom.

Writing Assessments

Assessment is the final topic for this course. However, it isn't the "end of the road" for your students' writing experiences. In this lesson, you'll learn that assessment is an ongoing process that you can use as a tool for improving both learning and teaching. The lesson will start with a comparison of traditional and alternative assessment options. Next, you'll focus on how to use authentic writing tasks and portfolios to assess writing. Finally, you'll learn how to develop and use rubrics so that you'll be well-equipped to evaluate your students' writing.