Equip Your Students

Many of our students are daunted by the task of writing. To ensure they are willing to task risks and not rely on the adults in the room, it is essential we provide them with knowledge, tools, and ongoing opportunities for practice.

The knowledge: Phonics.

• If you teach primary students, your phonics lessons will be daily, explicit, and progressive based on a scope and sequence. Then, take opportunities to reinforce what you are teaching in these lessons throughout the day during a morning message, literacy stations, shared reading, and shared writing, for example.
• If you teach older students, you likely will not have an explicit phonics lesson. However, you can be responsive to student needs and talk regularly and explicitly about specific graphemes-phoneme correspondences.
• Students inevitably ask, “How do you spell…?” Ensure your language supports them (and everyone else listening) in the moment and going forward. “What two letters say /ar/? That’s right, a-r. Remember, when the letter r comes after a vowel, the r is in charge.” “I hear the long a sound in paint. What two letters say /ā/ in the middle of a word?”
• With students of any age, I remind them to try to spell “word by word” or “syllable by syllable.” Sometimes they say a whole sentence (or a longer word) they want to write and they don’t even know where to begin. “Give it a try, word by word.”

The tools: A word wall.

• I feel strongly about this tool! For specifics, read this post from last spring.

Opportunities to practice: Daily, low-stakes writing.

• Our students should be writing something daily. This is not writing to be handed in and assessed but rather an opportunity to practice and take risks.
• What are some low-stakes forms of writing? Journal entries, freewrites, and reader response are the three low-stakes forms I suggest every week of the school year.

If we want to curb our students’ habit of asking “How do you spell…?”, they need knowledge and tools in their repertoire!

(We’ll save morphology for another day although it too will empower student writers.)