Use sentence starters to make writing fun and accessible

 I was always intrigued by how students viewed writing.  Most said they hated it (at the beginning of the year) but with practice and a variety of writing activities, they came around.  What intrigued me the most, though, was how much more they jumped on writing when they were given a fun prompt or a sentence starter.

In my last few years in the classroom, we needed to focus on informational writing, especially text-dependent responses, because our 6th graders struggled with responses on state testing.  A lot of time was spent on RACES, which I wrote about in this blog post.

 Take the hatred out of writing

Kids don't like writing because they:

• have had to write and rewrite until it was painful (there's a place for this - not the painful part - but working hard on a piece isn't a bad thing.  It just shouldn't be the only thing.)
• didn't get too much experience doing it
• didn't know how to get started

How to counter that?  Give them lots of exposure to writing.  To make sure that we wrote regularly, we had "Writing Fridays."  (I know, it's not an alliteration, but it worked! 😍)

 Build in regular writing time

You have a way of running your class.  I played around a lot with a Daily 3 model, with choice boards, and with centers.  Regular writing time works with all of them.

 Does it have to be fun?

Yes, at least to start and to get kids hooked.  And there are lots of ways to do that!

• This is a great guided writing unit for Halloween
• Working on paragraphs with mentor sentences was very helpful
• Mentor sentences are so much fun to play with
• Playful writing, starting a topic and throwing new ideas at them as they write, is another way to engage them.  You can find some samples in this free Bell Ringer resource.

How do you get your students to enjoy writing?  Leave your tips in the comments!