Teach Writing Every Day with Secondary Students
How can we teachers add writing to enrich our students’ experiences? With a few ideas, you can teach writing every day with secondary students.
Students need to write. Have your students write! Student see themselves as writers when they have numerous opportunities to write. Provide various writing changes for students.
Do you hear those messages? We secondary teachers do. Naturally, teachers want their students to be prepared for their next step in life. Writing every day with secondary students is the current movement for students to successfully enter the workforce or college.
You can design the writing activities in a practical, natural way. I personally am building this concept into my classroom, and I am not buying a fancy program either. Here are ways to teach writing every day with secondary students.
Grammar
I teach grammar through direct instruction and then through application and analysis. A quick writing activity can be writing by emphasizing grammar. Consider:
Write a specific concept, such as two sentences with two abstract nouns.
Write a paragraph and identify a concept, such as underlining all verbs.
Write sentences to model a concept, such as types of sentences.
This guided writing naturally lends itself to practicing capitalization, comma, apostrophe, and other fun rules. Since you’ll be seeing snippets of their writing, you can better manage where to focus grammar instruction.
Reading Response
What did you read yesterday? Start class by giving students a choice in what they ponder through writing. Doing so provides several benefits. Students can choose to review reading, which then allows you to clarify misconceptions. If students are confident in their understanding, they can choose a piece they specifically enjoyed to discuss. You can also review a graphic organizer and then ask students to draw a conclusion or evaluate the author’s structure from the graphic organizer.
At the end of a unit, ask students to reflect on their best writing piece and to turn it into a fleshed out project. Students will already have the prewriting, have the confidence, and have the interest to write the larger paper.
Quote of the Day
I’ve used a variety of bell ringers over the years, and what I’ve learned is that the bell ringer doesn’t matter, but starting class in an orderly fashion matters a great deal.
One year, I decorated my classroom with famous quotes. I rotated them throughout the year and encouraged students to bring me powerful quotes. We utilized them as writing prompts, too. If a student couldn’t invest in what we were currently discussing, another option was to choose a quote and apply it to his or her life.
Currently, my students and I are not writing every day, but I want to change that. (I once incorporated this practice into my lessons. Somehow, it has fallen off a bit.)
I partially wrote this post as a forced reflection exercise for myself. I taught sophomores this previous semester, and I think we could have done more. more reading and writing.
My idea to get students engaged and invested is with a basic notebook and a pencil. We will write every day: a reflection over reading, a practice with new grammar concepts, an example or drawing of vocabulary words, or a brainstorming of larger writing assignments.
My goal is to create meaningful conversations and writing. I’m not seeing that growth and as I reflect, I’m working to incorporate everyday writing with students.
Related Posts
9 Ways to Get Secondary Students to Enjoy Writing
About the Author
Lauralee Moss is the author of The English Grammar Workbook and creator of Language Arts Classroom.
When she is not teaching or writing, she is probably reading, drinking coffee, chasing her three kids and two dogs, or binge-watching documentaries with her husband.
She teaches high school English full-time in Central Illinois. She has worked in a variety of schools for the previous decade. Visit her on Instagram or Facebook.
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