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Scaffolding Beginning Writers

Scaffolding Beginning Writers

We are 14 days into school (woohoo) and I wanted to share some of the ways I’m supporting my very-beginning writers. One of the best parts of 1st grade is seeing the amazing growth students make in 9 short months. They enter writing single sentences (sometimes single words) and leave writing cohesive paragraphs – it’s amazing! BUT, students need daily, explicit writing instruction for this to happen with chances to write every.single.day. Here is how scaffolding beginning writers can be done!
Teaching 1st grade last year, I never knew I needed to teach students to write in a journal. So, I handed out writing journals and we jumped in. FRIENDS – I paid dearly for my mistake ALL year long and writings journals were a hot mess. Letters everywhere, mish-mashed pages of writing, tons of illustrations for missing writings – ALL.MY.FAULT.

Questions You Will Get When Scaffolding Beginning Writers

How Do I Write in a Journal?

This year, I was more proactive and started with a “How to Write in a Journal” mini-lesson on the 2nd day of school. So, you might be asking, how do you write in a journal?
  • Open to the closest empty page
  • Date in the upper right-hand corner
  • Picture on the bottom or top (please decide before writing)
  • Your letters should fit on two lines. Lowercase letters fit below the first line.
  • Leave a 1-line space between your writing
As you’ll see throughout this post, our journals are not perfect…BUT they are lightyears ahead of where I was last year. Plus, I am *super* proud of my friends. They have worked SO hard on writing and I already have some fabulous writers (thanks Kinder teachers!!).

How Do I Spell???

On Day 3, our mini-lesson is all about the chorus on “I don’t know how to spell. How do you spell? What letter comes next?” Give into these demands and your writing conferences turn into a Spelling Bee instead of a conversation.

In front of the whole class I model writing a narrative by stretching out words. Then, I underline words I am unsure of. I teach my students that an underline means – “Hey Ms. W. I tried really hard to stretch out this word, but I still don’t think it’s right.” If it is a sight word, a sound is obviously missing, or a phonics pattern we’re learning, I’ll ask students about it. If not, I leave it for now.  Underlining is a sanity saver!

One of the most daunting parts of writing is the forgotten word. I love when students read their writing to me, only to realize they left out the word “Phil”. From the very beginning, I teach my students to insert ‘carrots’ (this little friend added some arrow pizzaz) to indicate words need to be added. For long sentences or details that are added, I teach students to use an astrik and add it at the bottom of their paper. It keeps us from panicking and it reminds students they should be rereading their work.

*Standing on soapbox*
So, as teachers, we are told over and over that our math instruction needs to move from Concrete to Representational to Abstract. And we do this because it provides ‘real’ experiences of students and a context for real. Guess what? It works and it’s amazing! WRITING IS NO DIFFERENT. Students must have hands-on, real-experiences. Writing cannot remain this painful task of pencil-to-paper work, I’m-writing-because-my-teacher-told-me-to-write. 
*Off soapbox*

How Do I Make Writing ‘Real’? 

During the 2nd week, I put my scientists to work to explore and learn about our three class plants – Plantuska (bamboo), Phil (a vine), and Rocket (a hydrangea). Students worked in partners with a magnifying glass to make observations about our plants. After spending 15-20 minutes making observations and talking about them, we went back to our seats and wrote about one of the plants we observed. I turned on Yo-Yo Ma and it was AMAZING. I love seeing my friends in their element. Plus, they were plant experts (duh – 15 minutes does that for you!) and knew exactly what they wanted to share.

Real-world experiences matter when writing. They provide students with the confidence to write, the context for why we are writing, and a scaffold for how to start.

 

How Do I Use a Sentence Stem?

In the first few weeks, I do use a lot of sentence stems. While students are always welcome to stray from this support, for many it gives them a way to structure their ideas. As I begin launching Writer’s Workshop on Monday (woohoo), I’ll begin to remove these stems. They will reappear as we start writing paragraphs and open responses. This is a perfect way of scaffolding beginning writers.

How Do I Assess My Writing?

With writing journals, I do struggle with a way to evaluate and encourage students to add more details. This week one of our mini-lessons was all about adding details to our illustrations and writings. I had 4 pre-written/pre-illustrated versions of the same story. Students helped me to rate the writings (1-4 stars). We talked about what questions we had as we read the stories, what was missing from the illustrations, and which story we would rather read. Then, we went back to our seats and looked at some of our old writings from the first 2 weeks of school. Additionally, We went back, adding details to our writings and our illustrations to make their 3 and 4 star works of art! It was a simple mini-lesson, that we’ll reference often. (You can snag these sentences and writing paper for here free or snag it as a part of my Beginning of the Year writing bundle here.)

How Do I Share My Writing?

In these beginning weeks of writing, I also explicitly teach my students how to share their writing and give feedback to their friends. We save the last 7-8 minutes of our writing block for sharing. This is the biggest motivator for my kids; they LOVE sharing their writing. Typically 4-5 students share each afternoon, so every child has the opportunity to share each week. This is so much easier to do once you have a positive relationship with students.

Our sharing routine looks like this –

  1. Encouragement/Building Community Teacher: “I choose __________.” (in a sing-song voice) Students: “Let’s go __________!” (in a sing-song voice that matches mine)
  2. Sharing the Work: The student puts his/her work under the document camera so it projects on the screen, and wears the microphone to share.
  3. Specific Feedback: Then, the friend who just read his/her work chooses 2 friends from the class to give a specific compliment (“I love how you told me ___________.” “You did a great job of _______________.” “I really liked how you _________________.”
  4. Class Cheer: The presenter may then choose a class cheer to receive. We use Kagan Cheers and love them. Our favorites? Trucker, roller coaster, seal of approval. 🙂
Friends, I am so excited to see how my 1st graders grow this year. I feel like we’ve devoted a *ton* of time to writing this year, but it is already paying off. Plus, these initial scaffolds will allow for Writer’s Workshop to launch easily this week!
What are your go-to ways to scaffold beginning writers? I’d love to hear what works for your classroom! If you’re interested in the resources and mini-lessons for the ideas above, you can snag them here.
BOY Writing MiniLessons Cover

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Comments

    • Julia Wells says

      I am a first year first grade teacher. I have struggled with writer’s workshop. Out of the 12 students I have, only 4 of them can write independently. The rest struggle with Spelling words which translates to having a hard time with making sentences. I have been working really hard with them on sight words and sounding out words, but they are still struggling, I am trying to figure out what to do. I really like this blog post. You have so many great ideas on how to help them and you! I will definitely try some of these and see what happens.

      Reply

  9. Gretchen Edwards says

    I love your blog! I began using Writer's Workshop last year and what a difference it made in my kids' writing! I used the book No More I'm Done by Jennifer Jacobson to help develop my lessons. Good luck with your writing workshop this year and I'm looking forward to hearing more about it!

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  13. Amy Cain says

    I love your ideas for Writer's Workshop. Hopefully I can cram in a lot of them at the beginning of the year next year before we're required to use our Series.

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  16. Jiyoung kim says

    Any suggestions for kiddos who are brand new to the country? I am struggling for way to support the 3 kiddos who and 2nd language speakers during writing time.

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  17. Cara J Caplinger says

    Somewhere on the internet, I read about giving feedback called “Stars and Wishes.” After writers shared their piece under the doc camera, they would ask 2 students to give them a star (compliment, like good finger spacing, neat handwirting, using punctuation, etc.) and a wish. A wish is something that they would like the writer to do differently the next time. I started using this in 2nd grade and the engagement tripled, espeically during that last hour of the day when keeping their attention is a huge task.

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