Back to school lessons for writing in third, fourth, and fifth grade

I remember the year my sixth grade friend moved down to fourth grade.

After the first week of school, she was stressed.

“I don’t know if any of them have ever written anything before,” she said. “They’re just writing random strings of words on the paper.”

I looked at her students’ writing. “Yep, looks about right,” I thought. “That’s what they do at first,” I told her.

She stared at me. “What do you mean?”

“That’s just what they do. We have to teach them to make sense.” She was horrified.

Apparently sixth graders make a little more sense than fourth graders.

That’s when I really spent some time thinking: how do I get my kids to make sense in their writing?

Here are a few lessons it’s imperative to do at the beginning of the year in order to support your writers from day one!

1. Writing makes sense. Writers re-read their writing.

This might sound harsh, but the truth is, if we’re not making sense in our writing, we’re not communicating very effectively.

And this is something we often have to explicitly teach/remind students about.

I started with this anchor chart, but the point wasn’t to chart it. The point was to use it as a guide to evaluate every single piece of writing we produced during the first few weeks of school.

Did it take a lot of time?

Yep.

Was it excruciating?

Double yep.

And did it put me behind on my pacing guides?

Absolutely it did.

But spending the painstaking time the first few weeks of school to have students re-read their writing and correct the things they were able to see became absolutely fundamental to my students’ writing growth.

This means after every science experiment observation, every math explanation, every writing prompt, every reading response, and every social studies response, we stopped, re-read our writing, and I modeled using the chart to fix anything I could find.

Learn more tips for structuring your writing program effectively here on the blog!

Priceless.

2. Start mentor sentences.

Students can only accurately use the sentence structures they know.

They only know the ones we’ve taught them or their brains have mapped.

But even if they have figured it out on their own, without a common language to discuss it, we won’t be able to help them revise or edit their writing down the road.