Young writers need freedom to invent spellings, fostering confidence and phonological awareness. As they progress, understanding English orthography's complex structure becomes crucial. The goal isn't perfect spelling, but developing thoughtful encoders who analyze words. By balancing creativity with gradual introduction of conventions, we guide children towards becoming confident, reflective spellers and skilled writers.
Category: primary grades
Getting to Know You: Building Classroom Community Through Shared Writing
Get to know each student and build classroom community with this beginning-of-the year shared writing activity that also includes language development for multilingual learners.
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Puppets and Playdates: A Pre-Writing Strategy for Character Development and Writing Engagement in the Kindergarten Classroom
Puppets are powerful vehicles through which kindergarten students can develop characters and experiment with storytelling and play is essential to the way that young children learn. By combining puppets and play, children can begin to do the important pre-writing work necessary to develop rich characters and powerful stories in writing workshop.
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The Idea Book: A Tool To Help Kids Live Like Writers
It's never too early to instill writerly habits. A class idea book will inspire kids to collect seeds for writing everywhere they go (and much, much more!).
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Introducing a New Co-Author
There’s a new primary voice on our co-author team!
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Teaching the Four Types of Writing Through Texts
Janiel Wagstaff's books will help you teach primary writers about the four types of writing in an engaging way. Leave a comment on this post for a chance to win her series of Stella books.
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Looking at Student Writing
Comparing two writing samples may be as effective as scoring using a rubric
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Dialogue in First Grade
See how these first graders added dialogue to their narrative writing.
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Brave Spelling
How can we encourage our youngest writers to use brave spelling? How can we help them overcome their fear of getting it wrong?
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In Thanks: Books That Built a Writing Teacher
What are the books that have shaped you as a teacher of writing? Reflecting today, in thanks, for the authors and books that have influenced my life as a teacher.
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Setting the Stage for Summer: Write from the Start!
So I stepped back and let the writers get to work. The chatter was about organizing notebooks, planning where they like to write and sharing writing over the summer.
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Making a Chart: When I’m Done with My Writing
A chart for first graders
