Ways to Help Early Writers

I was looking through my portolio this morning, and I came across some wonderful before and after pictures of my student's writing. It got me to thinking about what I did to get my students from where they were in August to where they were in May. What did I do to help those students who struggle with writing? I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you. In the early stages of writing, it is normal for students to begin writing with invented spelling, in that they spell words by sounding them out. All Kindergarten and first grade teachers are fluent readers of invented spelling. However, some students come to us that do not have this skill yet. As teachers, it is our job to teach them how to do this and support them until they can do this independently. But what is the best way to do that? Of course we all teach phonics and reading. But is there something more we can be doing to help these struggling writers? Below is a list of things I used in my own classroom that were very effective, and I wanted to share them with you.

1. Shared and Interactive Writing - The process of shared and interactive writing is crucial to jump starting your early writers' progress. If you don't know what this is, shared and interactive writing is a process where the whole class or a group of students write a shared story, usually on big chart paper. The teacher guides the students to think of what to say and then closely scaffolds as they come up and "share the pen". Sometimes the teacher will write to model, and sometimes the student writes as the teacher guides. I will go into this process further on another blog and possibly a video.

2. Help students understand the difference between letters and words. Believe it or not, some young students do not know the difference. During my class' shared and interactive writing lessons, I always have my students say the sentence we are going to write BEFORE WE BEGIN and hold up fingers to count the words in the sentence. You will be surprised how many students have trouble with this. During independent writing, I may draw a line for each word in the sentence that my struggling students are getting ready to write. Then I say the sentence aloud as I point to each line, showing the student where to write each word. This is particulary good for those students who write a single string of mostly random letters.

3. Phonemic Awareness - Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words. Your Kindergarten and First Grade classroom should have lots of phonemic awareness activities. Skills that should be taught for phonemic awareness are:

• Phoneme isolation

• Rhyming activities

• Teach beginning sound isolation in words

• Teach ending sound isolation in words

• Teach beginning, middle, and end isolation sounds in words.

• Teach students to listen for syllables in words

4. Word Wall - Let's face it. Some words just can't be sounded out. That's hard for our little ones to understand because we teach so much phonics. Therefore, we have to be vigilant in teaching them that some words just break the rules and we have to memorize those words. It is important to have a word wall up in your classroom. Add those sight words to your word wall when you teach them. Don't start off the year with all of the words up at once. When students entered my first grade classroom on day one, my word wall was there but it was blank. The first thing we added to our word wall was their name. Kids love to see their name and it helps them to understand how to use the word wall. Add your words as the students learn them, slowly building your word wall bank that they can use as a reference when writing. During shared and interactive writing time, refer to the word wall often, showing the students how to use it. The more they use your word wall, the more they will begin to learn these words without having to look. This also helps with reading fluency.

5. Have students read their writing back to you. Early learners need to understand that what they are writing actually means something. When they read it back to you ask them if it looks right, does it sound right. If not, how can we fix it?

I have included some writing samples from my own students to show how these things can help over time. I have beginning of the year samples then end of the year samples.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but just a start of some of the things we need to be doing to help our little ones become successful writers. With Common Core in place, this is more important than ever. Click on our link below to receive, COMPLETELY FREE, our Writing Journal Prompts for April. You will have a month's worth of writing prompts at your fingertips that are themed for the month of April. Thank you for visiting our blog. Don't forget to like our facebook page and subscribe to our blog. HAPPY TEACHING!