Scaffolding expository writing for struggling writers

organized? They start out writing about their favorite sport, baseball, and end up writing about how their hamster got stuck under the sink? Or their sentences are out of order, creating a disorganized mess?
I’ve worked with these students every year of my career – I think all of us have! I’d like to share with you the approach that’s working for my kids.
For these students, I tried a differentiated approach to writing expository pieces. It’s highly structured (you might say formulaic) approach. To be clear: I don’t like to teach students a formula for writing! It’s not real; they can do so much better with consistent instruction.
But to support those students who were significantly behind and struggled with simple sentence structure, organization, and coherence of their writing, I wanted to provide them with a very guided structure so their writing would make sense.
Because that’s really what it is – when writing doesn’t make sense to the reader, it’s frustrating to the writer and they really don’t know how to revise it. It’s better to start with a scaffold before your writers get so frustrated. It’s meeting their instructional needs through differentiation! (I wouldn’t recommend doing this with all your kids! That would be limiting your stronger writers.)
Setting a purpose for writing
Generating ideas
Students choose their strongest two reasons to move on to the planning stage.
We fill in the 2 main reasons we came up with in the “Reasons” column. Then we go back to the introduction.
The introduction is a question. It can start with question words such as, “Do you-,” “Can you think of-,” or “Is there-.” Then we plug the topic statement into the line under the question line. After they master this simple introduction, you can jazz it up by reading about the ideas here.
After that, students add in the details: why the reason is important to them, and an example for each reason.
At the end, students fill in the blank conclusion line by flipping the topic statement: In conclusion, spring is my favorite season.
Here’s another sample where I wrote about my favorite place:
And this is how a student applied it to her own prewriting & planning:
After we plan, we turn our plan into a four-paragraph draft. It’s a start to a basic piece for students who are struggling with writing simple expository pieces. Try it out and let me know how it goes!
To guide students to deeper revision of their writing, check out my Expository Revision Guides on TPT, or watch this handy dandy video to learn about how to support kids in revising their writing!
Great tips! Students often need lots of practice with planning for their writing!