How To Teach Writing
Effective Tips on How to Teach Writing
In order to learn how to teach writing, you need to inspire your students to want to use their creative skills. You can encourage them to write about the events going on around them, or let them use their imaginations to write about places and people who don't exist – fantasy and science fiction.
You may have students who do not have any interest in writing, and these will be harder to reach. Perhaps they lack rudimentary skills in handwriting, or basic use of the English language. These must be overcome before your students will want to try their hand at writing.
One way to motivate your students and teach writing is to give them the tools to create their own journals. The journals don't have to be all writing; they can include photos, stickers, etc. This may open your students' eyes to topics that can be written about.
You can also combine writing with another class, and have your students write reports or summaries of other classes they are studying at the same time. How to teach writing includes reading books as another excellent way to inspire your students to write. They can study sentence structure and paragraph-building through the works of authors they enjoy reading. Then they can apply these skills to their own writing.
You may also wish, if your young students are having trouble getting started, to read a story to them and ask them to put themselves in the characters' shoes, and write a short piece about that character. This will enable them to work on their writing skills without having to create a concrete storyline to build upon.
Another way to challenge your students is to read them a story without reading the ending, and have your students write their own endings to the story. This will help them develop their own style and their own creative ways to express themselves through writing. After they're done, you can read the actual ending of the story, and praise the students for either coming close to the actual ending, or for using a more creative way to end them. This will also make it seem less like you're trying to teach writing only, and let the students know that writing is a part of their other classes.
As far as how to teach writing paragraphs to your students, you can start with one sentence and let small groups of students work together to add to the idea expressed in the original sentence, until they have more ideas. Then they can work together to assemble the ideas into a coherent paragraph.
Photo journals are an eye-catching way to help your young students, and make it easier for you to concentrate on how to teach writing. They can be used as a jumping-off point for writing short stories about the events depicted in the photos. This can be a “rough draft” journal, and you can have them submit just the writing for a grade. You can make corrections on the worksheets rather than in their journals. This way, they are learning, and you are not making negative notations in their journals.
Allow your students to express their own ideas in writing. Encourage them to explore feelings, and praise them when they write an interesting and properly-structured story. Then they will be on their way to becoming students who enjoy writing, and thus will work harder at becoming good writers.