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Actually Teaching Writing

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After a 2-month hiatus (it turns out that starting a new school and planning my wedding are VERY time-consuming activities), I return now to tell you about an unbelievably awesome writing program that my school has just adopted.  I spent 4 days in January at training sessions to learn how to use this program and teach it to the rest of the staff at my school, and it’s something that all ELA teachers should look into.  The program is equally useful for all grades in K-12 schools, so check it out!

You very well may have heard of Judith Hochman’s “Teaching Basic Writing Skills” program.  Dr. Hochman’s program is based on 25+ years of research, and it has succeeded in improving students’ writing skills so much that entire districts (including Washington, D.C.) are implementing her methods and seeing tremendous results.

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Think for a second about your students’ writing… I’m sure you can imagine room for improvement.  If you’re like me, you often receive totally jumbled messes of sentences and paragraphs.  Many of my students can’t begin to write coherently unless I provide sentence starters for them.  But with Hochman’s program, I am already seeing this change.

I can’t possibly tell you in one blog post all you need to know to start using the Hochman program in your class.  You really need to go through the training in order to put all the pieces together.  I will say, though, that the basic premise is that all writing work needs to start at the level of the sentence before you can get to paragraphs and essays.  Hochman begins with sentence activities, and I’ll share one of those activities with you in this post.  Only after students have had LOTS of work with sentences are they ready to move on to paragraphs.  In addition, Hochman’s program teaches students to become better note-takers, to build their vocabulary skills, and, above all, to write high-quality expository/informational essays, which will inevitably help them on state tests and – more important – the kinds of writing tasks they will encounter in their future jobs.

Here’s a sneak peek at one of the sentence activities.  It’s called “because/but/so,” and its purpose is to teach students how to use conjunctions in sentences, particularly conjunctions that come up very often and are familiar to students: because, but, and so.  This activity can be used at all grade levels, simply by modifying the concepts and vocabulary you use in the sentence stems (you’ll see what I mean in a moment).  This activity can be used with a text the students are reading, or it can be used to assess their prior knowledge.  It can be used as a warm-up, an exit ticket, a review, a homework, or a test/quiz question.  Here are some examples:

1.) The teacher was happy because ____________________________.

The teacher was happy, but ________________________________.

The teacher was happy, so ________________________________.

2.) Andrew Jackson was a popular president because __________________.

Andrew Jackson was a popular president, but _____________________.

Andrew Jackson was a popular president, so _____________________.

(these examples come directly from Hochman’s book, “Teaching Basic Writing Skills”)

Yesterday, I began a new unit and wanted my students to make predictions based on the front and back covers of the book we’ll be reading.  As an opening warm-up activity, I gave my students a “because/but/so” (I took out the “so” part this time, which is okay) sentence activity with the stem “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”  It looked like this:

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The responses that I got were mostly well-written and clear, and they also showed me who was able to use these conjunctions correctly and write their thoughts clearly and coherently.  I could have assigned a paragraph instead, but this quick sentence activity gave me all the information I needed and got my students thinking about the activity we were about to do.  And best of all, they were SO fast to grade!

Three quick and important tips for creating a “because/but/so” activity:

  1. MODEL the activity first!  Most students won’t intuit how to do this exercise without a model.
  2. ALWAYS anticipate what the students might write as their responses.  Try finishing the sentences yourself before you give the assignment and see if your sentence stems (starters) will yield the results you want.
  3. ALWAYS repeat the sentence stem for every conjunction.  You want 3 separate sentences in this activity.  Students will NOT understand that right away.  I made this mistake and got messy results.  Repeat the stem each time on the page, just like you see in the examples above, so that students know to write 3 separate sentences.

Another quick note — the “so” part should mean “therefore,” as opposed to “so that.”  Basically, the “because” part should prompt a reason, the “but” part should prompt an exception, and the “so” part should prompt a conclusion.  A lot of great critical thinking work goes into this activity!

This is one of MANY writing activities from Hochman’s “Teaching Basic Writing Skills” program.  I can’t recommend it enough!  All of the teachers in my school are using her sentence activities in class each week, and we’re on our way to seeing vast improvements in our students’ writing!


Tagged: basic writing skills, Classroom, Education, elementary school, English, High school, Hochman, middle school, Reading, sentences, students, teaching, Writing

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