It’s time to look at writing skills. Many students can face challenges when putting pen to paper, a lack of inspiration or clarity, or simply difficulty finding the right words. In this blog we’re looking at activities and advice you can use to bring precision and inspiration to your students writing.
Start Small
Diving into producing a big chunk of text can be daunting for many students. We often recommend to start with a plan, or mind maps of ideas and vocabulary, but why not challenge them to keep their ideas as small as possible. Starting with a tweet (only 140 characters or less) encourages your students to think about the key ideas at the center of what they want to discuss. Turn it into a competition by giving students a certain number of ‘likes’ (or stickers) they can use to vote on who wrote the best tweet.
Build up key language before starting to write
To help prevent your students getting stumped, build up a bank of useful words before starting. Throwing a ball around in a word association game or list competitions where students compete to come up with the most vocabulary all help students to create a bank of lexicon relevant to the task at hand. You can give your students an image and ask them to use as many nouns, adjectives and verbs to label every single thing happening in the photo – if the larger writing task is about holidays for example, give students a busy photo of a beach and 4 minutes to label everything they can in a competition like activity. Or, split students into groups, give them a set space on the whiteboard or wall and a set of post it notes. Have the teams race to see which group can fill their space with post it notes containing relevant vocabulary the fastest. Simple warm up activities like this are key when building your students confidence when it comes time to put pen to paper. Make sure to switch these warm up activities regularly in order to keep classes fresh and exciting.
Writing to each other
It can be difficult to make writing activities communicative, which can lead to the tasks feeling less purposeful and engaging for students. Asking your students to complete emails telling their peers a story, or information about a given topic, and asking their partner to reply can help bring communication into writing tasks.
Take it one step further by playing a game of ‘Telephone’, where one student starts by writing a piece of information, and the next student must pass it on it written form without repeating any of the words used in the last note. This type of warm up activity helps students come up with inventive vocabulary around an idea. As an example, starting with the text:
“I went for a walk with my dog on the beach on Saturday.”
can become:
“He strolled with his pet on the sand last weekend.”
which can then become:
“He hiked near the ocean with a furry animal a few days ago.” etc. etc.
Asking students to write more concisely
Improve your students precision in writing by asking them to reduce texts down to their essence. Take a longer text on a relevant topic, perhaps a letter or email written by an imaginary student, that has lots of excess words and repetition within it. Ask your students to re-write the text within a certain number of words. A similar way of approaching this task, ask your students to freewrite consistently for two minutes on a topic, this will help them to put down all of their ideas, without focusing on precision and accuracy, then give them slightly more time to re-write the text in a concise format, and with as few mistakes as possible.
First person writing
Asking students to work on monologues is a fantastic way to improve their first person writing skills. Show students some examples of monologues, from films or plays, or instead focus on a character from history (a famous singer, politician or sports person for example). Students can take time to research this persons life story, or their version of a particularly famous event, and recreate it in their own words. You may even have some confident students who are happy to perform their monologue in front of the class.
Incorporate habitual writing into the class:
Keep writing as regular as possible to avoid it becoming a daunting task when larger writing activities come up. One handy tip which is useful for both students and teachers alike is to ask students to complete an ‘Exit ticket’ at the end of each class. Get in to the routine of giving students a ticket like the following at the end of every class:
- Today I learned…
- My question is….
Asking students to fill in a simple sheet like this before class ends, and handing it in as they exit helps in a multitude of ways. Firstly, it provides an opportunity for reflection and focusing on what was achieved from the lesson. Positively focusing on what was gained from a lesson helps students maintain motivation. Secondly, it provides a chance for the teacher to know what issues the class is having, which is particularly useful in classes where students are less confident to ask questions in front of each other. Thirdly, it reinforces regular opportunities for writing. Casual opportunities to write two or three short sentences helps reinforce sentence and question structure, as well as helping writing become more habitual in the classroom.
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Check out the rest of our Back to Basics series here: