Best Strategies to Teach Writing, Spelling and Grammar to Elementary Students

One of the most important things to understand about writing is that it is a process. This is not a skill that you develop and perfect immediately. There are very few people that can begin writing at the top of the page and write continuously, until they finish at bottom of the page without stopping to correct some mistakes. There are five steps in the writing process.

1. Prewriting is the first step and it is what helps the students to come up with ideas on what they want to write about. Prewriting ensures that students do not make simultaneous decisions about language and content as they are writing (Davin & Donato, 2013). There are various ways that students cab encouraged to come up with writing ideas, one activity that can be used is brainstorming. In this strategy, the students can be encouraged to come up with a list of potential examples for a given topic. This is an activity that the students can engage in as an entire class or in small groups. There should be no restrictions for the students; they should be allowed to be as creative as they can (Davin & Donato, 2013). Free writing is another activity that can be used to help the students come up with content for their writing. The teacher should in this case teach the students to write down all the thoughts on the topic that they have. Once completed, the students should then go back and read what they wrote down and decide on the best ideas for the writing activity. A journalistic question is another strategy that can be used to help students come up with ideas to write about. This is where questions are used including; why, what, when, where, who and how to help understand writing ideas better. After writing the questions down, the teacher should encourage the students to answer them after which they should go back and organize their thoughts while they prepare for writing (Davin & Donato, 2013).
2. Drafting, this is the second step in the writing process and it is where the students use the ideas they crafted in the first stage to write rough draft writing. This allows the students to organize their ideas into actual sentences, grammar and punctuation is not really considered in this stage (Davin & Donato, 2013). The teacher can at this stage help the students by engaging then individually as they write, offering suggestions and praises as they observe the areas that the students have difficulty in.
3. Revising and editing is the next writing step where the teacher shows the student how to make changes in various areas to make their writing more coherent and clear. The teacher can teach the students the importance of rereading their work more than once to see whether it conveys their desired message (Davin & Donato, 2013). The students can read their work aloud to their peers to help understand the required revisions. This will greatly help the students to develop greater language proficiency as they work together with their peer when revising their work.
4. Rewriting is the fourth step in the writing process, where all the corrections being made in the first draft are made. At this point students have to be extra careful as they have to ensure that they consider all changes made to come up with a fine paper.
5. The last step is the publishing. This is where the students get to write their final copy that has been fully corrected. The teacher can appreciate the work of the students by publishing it in the school magazine or hanging it in class or in the school bulletin board (Davin & Donato, 2013). This will not only motivate the students to write more but it will also encourage other students to improve on their writing so that they can be appreciated.

The six traits of writing

This is an effective writing teaching method that has been incorporated by many teachers in their classrooms. In this model, six characteristics are used to help in defining quality writing including;

1. Ideas; this refers to the main idea and also the content of the writing. In this section, a writer is expected to come up with the details of the writing that are both informative and it should necessarily contain details that are already known to their readers (Jones, 2016). To help students think critically and come up with the right topic content in their writing, a teacher could come up with an activity for instance use of photographs where by the students explain what they think is happening in each of the photos. Doing this will help the students learn to pay attention to details and differentiate what is important and what is not while writing. The teacher could also read a poem and have the students discuss a real life connection that they have to the poem. The teacher should teach the students to always consider what the message of their writing is, whether all the details have been included and whether the message is clear.
2. Organization; this is all about ensuring that the content is focused. This is where the students should ensure that their writing can easily be understood in order to accomplish successful communication (Jones, 2016). This is all about coming up with catching hook that gives the readers a reason to care about the topic. The writing should include supporting details in concrete paragraphs, with each of them having a transition that allows the order to be sensible. The teacher should in this case teach the students the concept of organization in their writing. The teacher can do this by first teaching the students various sections of a writing including, introduction, body paragraphs and conclusions. She can then go ahead and read them a story which will help them understand how the various sections are incorporated in a writing. To help understand the importance of organisation in writing, the teacher can jumble a list of directions and then request the students to rearrange them in order. In this section, students should always consider how they begin and end their writing to ensure it is in order.
3. Voice; this is all about how the writer brings out their work to life, their passions and feelings of the topic. It is the personal tone that the writer uses in their work while trying to fit their work in the right genre (Jones, 2016). The teacher can teach the students about voice in writing by reading stories from one author after which they can all try and find the similarities in the two stories in regard to the tone. The teacher should teach the students to identify their personal tones in regard to how they feel about their chosen topics. They should always ask ensure that their work sound like them and that the readers understand their feelings when they read their work without straining too much.
4. Word choice; this refers to the vocabularies that the writer chose to use to convey meaning. Writers should always choose their words very carefully to ensure that their ideas are expanded (Jones, 2016). Words that are used in writing should move and at the same time enlighten the readers; metaphors, similes and other figurative language should be used to enrich the content of the writing. The teacher could teach the students on word choice by creating a list of words and another one of better word to use. The teacher in this case can help the students to make use of new words in place of the commonly used words in their writing. The teacher can ask the students to practice using the new words that they learn by forming sentences using them. This will help the students to incorporate the new vocabularies in their writing.
5. Sentence Fluency; this is how words and phrases flow through the text. If a similar pattern is followed over time, it becomes monotonous (Jones, 2016). A good illustration of this is writing where every paragraph begins with the word ‘The’. A fluent writing is one that has rhythm and does not have awkward word patterns that make it boring. Fluency can be taught to the students using acrostic poem, the teacher can write a short essay on the board with the student’s help. While doing this, the teacher can consequently ask the students to read the line of the poems out loud to determine if they are easy to read and if they make sense. During this activity, the teacher can teach the students to write complete sentences and how to begin sentences differently to avoid monotony.
6. Conventions; this is all about the mechanical correctness including spelling, grammar and punctuation in a writing. It is important for students to apply the correct spelling rules, to always use correct punctuation, use correct verb tenses and demonstrate paragraph organization in their writing. Teaching conventions is not easy and the best strategy to use is to teach them independently. A teacher should for instance introduce character, setting, plot and conflict when teaching narratives. All these are elements that need to be taught together to help students understand how to write a narrative. This same case applies when the teacher is teaching grammar, the teacher should always ensure that with every concept taught, the students are provided with an immediate way that they apply their grammar lesson to a writing assignment. The teacher should ensure that they assess every grammar element that they teach to ensure that the students follow it in all their writing. The stricter the teacher is, the more keen the students will be in ensuring that they correctly spell, punctuate and write complete sentences. Conventions are the determinants of a good or poor writer.

Teaching Spelling

Teaching spelling can be challenging, but if fun teaching strategies are incorporated, it becomes enjoyable and less tedious. One mistake that is made when teaching spelling is concentrating on memorization. People forget that different letters can produce different sounds in different words. When teaching spelling, the teacher should focus on teaching the students the sounds and not the letter names.

Words with similar spellings patterns should be grouped together and a list made like in the picture above (Child1st Publications, 2016). The teacher can create a word list with words that have sound long ‘I’. Children’s brains work best using patterns, grouping the chosen words in a column help the children to understand and actually see what the words have in common (Child1st Publications, 2016). In the word list, the sounds that the words have in common can be highlighted using a bright colour. The teacher can have the students construct sentences where they use as many words with the highlighted sound as possible. This will help the students to always remember different sounds without having to memorize them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Child1st Publications. (2016). How to Teach Spelling So Kids Will Remember. Retrieved

from https://child1st.com/blogs/resources/113147143-how-to-teach-spelling-so-kids-will-remember

Davin, K., & Donato, R. (2013) Student collaboration and teacher‐directed classroom

dynamic assessment: A complementary pairing. Foreign Language Annals, 46(1), 5-22.

Jones, J. (2016, December 28). What are the Traits? Retrieved from

            https://educationnorthwest.org/traits/trait-definitions