TEACHING WRITING STRATEGIES

1. TEACHING WRITING STRATEGIES Tetiana MYKHAILENKO, Editor in chief

2. REASONS FOR WRITING • Why does writing matter? • Why do we write? • Should we teach our students writing? • Is writing easy? Why? Why not? • Name three arguments…

3. Quotations that can help • “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Nathaniel Hawthorne • “Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” Gene Fowler • “When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.” Enrique Jardiel Poncela

4. Your expectations • What do you know about writing? • What do you consider to be the most difficult in teaching writing? • What writing strategies do you know? • What is the most important?

5. WRITING STRATEGIES • Prewriting • Drafting • Revising • Editing • Publishing • What is the most important in your opinion?

6. PREWRITING • Sketching;brainstorming;listing;questioning;modeling; pair sharing;

7. teacher/student conferences;timed writing/"wet ink writing“;journaling;clustering;

8. BASIC WRITING SKILLS • WORD ORDER: • Subject + Verb + What + Where + WhenI found the book easily at the library yesterday. • 1. Time expressions can come at the beginning or at the end of a sentence.

9. 2. Frequency adverbs (often, always, never) often come before the main verb. • 3. If a sentence has a direct object and an indirect object, we often place the indirect object first: "She wrote him a letter". • 4. Adjectives come before the noun and they have no plural form.

10. Subject-verb agreement:The subject and the verb must agree in number. • Some nouns are always followed by a singular verb (everything, news, furniture, information ...) • Some nouns are followed by a plural verb (people, children, police, trousers ...)

11. TECHNIQUES that help I Don’t Know What to Write About Topic T-Chart strategy • Like-Hate • Typical-Unusual • Fun-Have To • Regret-Proud Of

12. Like Pizza, The Internet, Ice cream, Music, Reading, My cat, Harry Potter, Soccer, Shopping, Candy Hate All vegetables, Homework, Science, Spelling tests, Getting dressed up, Cleaning my room, Rainy days, Being bored, Bowling, Golf on TV

13. Fun Out to dinner, Movies, Holidays, Staying up late, Rollerblading, Halloween, Talk on phone, Soccer camp, Singing Have To Get my hair cut, Getting up early, Wash the dishes, Babysit brother, Get good grades, Practice scales

14. What-Why-How strategy • • WHATdo you think? (This is your opinion) • • WHYdo you think it? (These are your reasons) • • HOW do you know? (This is your evidence or example)

15. Widen vocabulary • Acrostic Poems

16. ANTONYM SAYS! This activity is played similar to the game Simon Says. However, whatever "Aunt Nym" says to do, students do the opposite. For example, "Aunt Nym says, "Put your hands under your desk." Students will put their hands above their desks.

17. I LOVE YOU THE PURPLEST • Have each student choose a colour to write a poem about. • For example, one student may entitle their poem, "I Love You the Greenest" and write about how the colour green reminds them of the meadow grass or the majestic pines found in the mountains

18. PARTS OF SPEECH - MAKING A "NOUN" BOOK Discuss what kinds of words are nouns (people, places, and things) as well as different categories of nouns (common nouns, proper nouns, and collective nouns); have each student create their own book of nouns using pictures cut out of magazines.

19. Extension to this activity • Teach adjectives as words that describe nouns (colour, size, shape, etc.). • Either orally or on paper, students can get with a partner to trade books and think of two different words that might be used to describe each picture of a noun in their partner's book.

20. Y-Chart

21. What it looks like? • What it sounds like? • What it feels like? • How a character feels?

22. 10 things about animals

23. STORY STAR DIAGRAM A story star is a type of star diagram that can be used to describe the key points of a story, noting the 5 W's of the story: who, when, where, what, and why.

25. IDEAS FOR KIDS TO WRITE AT HOME Make a Menu Let your child design and write the menu for a family dinner while you do the cooking. Write Lists Let your child write the grocery list as you dictate what you need from the store.(to pack for a trip, plan a busy week, and prepare for back-to-school or holidays. )

26. WRITE A LETTER TO GRANDPARENTS Keep notecards and stationery on hand for letter writing. A letter from a grandchild is always a delight. Bad spelling and punctuation is overlooked!

27. WRITE A PICTURE STORY Draw a line about 2/3 down on a sheet of art paper. Let the child draw a picture of anything she wishes at the top. Then, guide her to write a story about the picture at the bottom.

28. Describing It Perfectly! • What colour was it? • What size was it? • What material was it made out of? • How old was it? • What was the texture? • What condition was it in? • How much did it weigh? • What did it remind you of?

29. Writing Activities for SHORT STORIES Colour Coded Write a short story that begins with the word "blue," and in which every paragraph has a colour or words denoting colours. Use the "colour word" only once in each paragraph, but suggest the colour in as many ways as possible.

30. WORDS CLOSE TO “BLUE” Grey, mud, asphalt, unpainted, concrete, faded, rubber, weathered, ash-coloured, bare, smoke

31. The world had turned grey. Nothing butmud and asphaltsurrounded the unpaintedhouse, little more than a box made of concrete blocks. Charlie, dressed in faded work pants,rubber boots, and a thick wool sweater, steadied himself with a hand on the top rail of a weathered cedar fence. Behind him, nothing but ash-colouredsky, bare trees, and plumes of smoke belching from the factory in the distance.

32. Turn a POEM into a short STORY • Using the poem of their choice for inspiration, have group members create: a character, a setting, a situation, and a character goal, from the poem and write a short story.

33. Dictionary Detail Have a student choose ten random words from a dictionary and use them tosuggest a character, a setting, and a problem.

34. Alphabetical Sentence Have students work alone or in small groups to write a sentence where each subsequent word begins with the next letter of the alphabet. For instance: "Acids, bases, compounds" Dorothy explains, "for group homework." Instantly jaded, knowing long monosyllabic nonsense oozes, pupils quickly revolt.”

35. LET’S SUM UP • What have we spoken about today? Writing strategies – can you name them? PREWRITING DRAFTING REVISING EDITING PUBLISHING

36. What is the most important in writing? PREWRITING What should we pay attention to while teaching prewriting? THREE PILLARS: 1. RICH VOCABULARY 2. SENTENCE BUILDER 3. BASIC GRAMMAR

37. References: • The Internet resources; • A digest of Stephen Wilbers' "Effective Writing" ; • Teaching Writing Skills. By Kenneth Beare, About.com Guide; • The Teacher’s Strategy Guide. By Steve Peha, “FULL” Version, for More inForMation • Visit ttMs.org

38. REMEMBER! The pen is the tongue of the mind. Miguel de Cervantes Writing is thinking on paper. William Zinsser

39. THANKS FOR COMING! english1veresnya@gmail.com mtatiana@ukr.net www.tmykhailenko.wikispaces.com