Teaching Writing: Children II

Lesson 4: Wrap-up

A Few Last Thoughts....

This course has taken you through a lot of material from some writing basics, through two writing genres, a look at bookbinding, and finally, the use of graphic organizers, checklists and rubrics. In this last section, I'll share just a few final thoughts.

Record keeping

However you choose to implement writing into your classroom, you will need to give some thought to record keeping. Many teachers who use a writing workshop approach choose to keep anecdotal records of student progress. See Routman, Chapter 13 for a detailed look at evaluation. I found that a "contact sheet" within my students' writing folders was a good place for me to make some anecdotal notes. I also had students keep a "Mary can..." list of skills they had mastered such as "Mary can capitalize proper nouns." Mary can write a good beginning." Students added new skills to their personal lists as they were mastered. This gave me a quick check on their progress.

I also used their writing checklists when I was evaluating. I'd see how closely the checklist "matched" the finished piece. For example, if a student checked that she had included good descriptive words - but actually hadn't, I'd know that was a skill that wasn't yet mastered.

Of course, you'll need to follow the grading and evaluation policies of your school, but these are a few ideas that much enhance your evaluation process.

Other Types of Writing

This course just touched on two of the four main writing genres, but there are many other facets of writing that you might want to explore with your students. They might like to learn about writing Tall Tales, summaries, compare and contrast paragraphs, letters, and many forms of poetry, just to name a few. This is just a beginning, but I hope you have found a few useful ideas and resources that will start you on your way to creating some wonderful writers in your classroom.

For more, you might also be interested in the first part of this course, Teaching Writing to Children.

Or, visit Teaching Creative Writing to Children: http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/teac... a new topic by Gloria Campos-Hensley at Suite 101.

Happy Writing!!

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