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July 7, 2015

Teaching Students to Organize Writing

Teaching Students to Organize Writing

Teaching 5th grade writing, essay after essay, I saw my students struggle to organize writing their ideas and paragraphs. They would have great ideas, but they would be scattered and undeveloped. So, teaching 1st grade, I knew it was critical that I teach my friends to organize writing. To help make organizing writing more concrete, we attach colors to the parts of our paragraphs – blue, yellow, green, and orange.

Color-coding to Organize Writing

Why the specific colors for each part of a paragraph? Well, that’s easy – those are the color highlights I have – ha! This is the ONLY time I allow my 1st grade friends to use highlighters. This creates excitement and novelty for writing. When we are awesome writers, we are able to use highlighters – woohoo! 🙂

4-square Graphic Organizer

As we learn how to write a paragraph and organize our ideas, I always start with the detail or reason. Initially (October/November) this becomes our ‘because’ sentence. When students use the word because to give a detail, they are allowed to get a highlighter and highlight their awesome work! (When you are in 1st grade, this is THE best!)
Little by little, our color-coding expands to other parts of the paragraph. Even as we do RACE open-response writing, our friends stick to this familiar structure. Although initially contrived, it slowly transitions students to writing paragraphs independently!
Additionally, check out this blog post which is FULL of ideas about gathering and organizing information.
This is a paragraph a friend wrote in response to reading The Cat in the Hat. We read the book together and then, students responded to the question – Would you want the Cat in the Hat to come over? by themselves.

If my family was not home, I would not like the Cat in the Hat to come over. I do not want the Cat in the Hat to come over because he would make a mess. In the book he made a mess in the tub and he kept rubbing it on everything. If this happened at my house, I would tell him to go out. I would not let him come over.

A Quick Visual Check to Organize Writing

Color-coding paragraph structure gets students (and me) to visually check for missing parts in their paragraph. In the paragraph below, this friend read about Martin Luther King Jr. during Read to Self and wanted to write about him during Work on Writing. When she went to color-code her paragraph, she realized she had skipped writing a wrap-up sentence.

And again, this friend could easily see she provided lots of reasons, but did not take the time to explain them. This was a ‘cold’ On Demand prompt, so it was interesting for me to see as a teacher what we were missing. After looking at several paragraphs missing green, we went back and practiced explaining our details and reasons!

Learn the Structure…then Change!

Now, not all paragraphs are structured the same. So, I do teach my friends to be flexible. Sometimes (toward the end of the year), our color-coding only denoted different parts of our paragraph. Below you’ll see a paragraph we wrote as a class about wood and jumping spiders. The main idea and wrap-up sentence are the same color (because they have the same jobs). Our comparisons are one color (green) and our differences are one color (red). In this situation, I want students to be able to easily differentiate between the parts of the compare/contrast paragraph.

Here is another example of some shared writing we did (this paragraph took us two separate mini-lessons). Again, we were flexible in our colors – grabbing the EXPO markers on the tray – but still making sure to identify the parts of our writing – main idea/wrap-up sentence, comparisons, differences.

Teaching students to color-code their writing is a simple way to help our friends organize their ideas and easily check to see if something is missing. But, as seen in our compare and contrast paragraphs, flexibility is key. We need to teach students that the colors aren’t as important as the content. It’s a slow transition, but an important one!

Other Blog Posts

Teaching and scaffolding students to write inform/explain is a tough skills. I’ve shared more ideas, strategies, and resources throughout the blog. Click on any of these title to read more!

Paragraph Writing with Littles (blog post, resource)

Gathering and Organizing Research

Using Prior Knowledge to Deeper Research 

Scaffolded Research in Primary (blog post, resource)

FREE Work on Writing Papers

Sweet! Thanks so much for joining me. Now check your email to confirm your address & snag your freebies. Happy Teaching! -Catherine

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Related Posts

  • Scaffolding Beginning WritersScaffolding Beginning Writers
  • Paragraph Writing in 1st and 2nd Grade
  • 1st Grade How To Writing
  • Work on Writing IdeasWork on Writing Ideas

Filed Under: 1st Grade, Differentiated Instruction, Reading/Literacy, Tips & Tricks, Writing Tagged With: 1st Grade, Writing

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Chris Saunders says

    July 7, 2015 at 7:58 pm

    I love this post! I really like the paper with the cat and dog and then the student picks their favorite pet—is that something you created? If so, have you considered a pack like that in your store? I love the rubric at the bottom!:) & the reading included with the writing!

    Reply
  2. Lindsey Neal says

    July 8, 2015 at 2:01 pm

    I love the 4-square writing paper. Did you create this?

    Reply
  3. 5th Grade Happenings says

    July 9, 2015 at 3:08 pm

    Your four square paper would even help our 5th graders write a paragraph at the beginning of the year. They seem to forget over the summer. I'll try it for sure. Thanks.
    Beti

    Reply
  4. Jenny Sherman says

    July 22, 2015 at 3:05 pm

    We're required to use the Step Up to Writing program at our school. I use highlighters to organize my 1st & 2nd graders writing also. Green for topic sentence and closing sentence. Yellow for supporting details/reasons. Red for information about the supporting details.

    I like that you give the word "because" special attention. It's difficult to get kids to want to explain their thinking in writing. Making this a special word could help encourage students to explain their thinking in other subject areas too. Great idea!

    Reply
  5. DegenhardtD4 says

    November 2, 2015 at 5:03 am

    It will be a great creative work among the students who have been tired and used to get more bored when they saw same syllabus and approaches, so something new to it will be highly amended between them. article rewriter online

    Reply
  6. Enndery Ashwin says

    November 14, 2015 at 9:40 am

    Online English Grammar Check Tool automatically proofreads our writing for basic grammar, punctuation and spelling errors. English writing is an art; however, any of us can make it effective in any field of life if we constantly keep on improving it. See more proper sentence structure checker

    Reply

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My name is Catherine Reed, and I am in Year 10 of my elementary life, residing in small-town, Kentucky.  I student taught in 1st grade and never ...

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