Practical Writing Strategies Classroom: Writing is a complex process and involves multiple steps that are constantly changing and mental flexibility that translates clearly to the written page. Writing requires:
- Staying on topic by keeping the ideas and thoughts in mind
- Appropriate sequencing of ideas
- Connecting relationships between ideas planning
- Having strong spelling and editing skills
The writing strategies below can be used to support the students understanding, self-awareness and use of language in written work across subjects.
Step 1: Reflection: Getting it Down!
Ask the student the following statements to support his self-awareness of the content in written work.
- This doesn’t sound right, so we need rewrite or add more?
- This is not what we intended to say, so we should leave this part out or should I try again with different words?
- People may not understand this part, so should you change the wording?
Step 2: Edit and Revise: Getting it Right
Another Practical Writing Strategies Classroom checklist is a grammar checklist for each table in the classroom for written work activities. Here is a short sample of what a checklist can contain; However, depending on your needs, you may continue to add items depending on the type of writing assignment and reminders you might need:
- Do the people, actions and places in my sentences agree?
- Did I use complete sentences with all the correct parts (who + what doing + where etc)?
- Did I include the main elements in the sentence e.g. who, what doing, where etc.
- Did I end each sentence with the correct punctuation?
- Did I capitalise all proper nouns correctly?
- Did I begin each sentence with a capital letter?
- Did I read aloud my work to myself slowly to make sure I am answering the question and my work makes sense to me and other people?
A great resource for supporting writing practically at home https://www.readingrockets.org/article/developing-writing-and-spelling-home