Teaching Writing

Tess Johnston

Student Information
I currently teach 28 fourth grade general education students at Burton Elementary
School in Grand Rapids. The classroom is an ESL room, where all of the students native
language is Spanish. My students vary in their development of English, some extremely fluent
and no longer translating in their head and others just emerging into English. All of my students
are Hispanic, but have strong ethnic pride in the country they have immigrated from (Mexico,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico). Twenty two of my twenty-eight
students fall under the 25th percentile in both reading and math. Four of my students have IEPs
and qualify for special education under speech and language. One of the four receives resource
support in addition to SLP support.
I have the most helpful, kind hearted, and considerate community of learners that truly
love being at school. My students, when engaged, are sponges that crave knowledge. It takes
extra planning and consideration to craft a day that engages my students and that is built upon
their strengths, but I feel as though I have gotten pretty good at doing this. I tune into my
students likes and interests and I make my instruction meaningful for them.
As a whole my class struggles with passion for reading, focus, reading comprehension,
vocabulary, and written expression. From the writing instruction i observed prior to my unit,
students were not given meaningful prompts nor an authentic audience.

Planning and Organizing Writing Strategies

A. My Goals for planning writing
a. My goal during the planning stage was for students to become more interested and passionate
about our topic and start to brainstorm ideas for their paper. This was a opinion writing unit in
our classroom, and the topic was Are immigrants important to America?. My goal was for
students to plan their argument that they were going to write about
B. Strategies Used
b. We filled out a planning sheet (see below). We had a lesson where we came together as a
class to brainstorm ideas of why immigrants are important. Then, we filled out a sheet to
organize our ideas and the student wrote the reasons they personally felt would best support
their opinion. Our audience was the classroom and also we would be sending the papers to our
state representative that we met when we toured the capital. We did a lesson with two mentor
opinion papers, a example and a non-example. Students were able to find and mark the
elements of good opinion papers.
Plan sheet:

Plan!
What is my topic?______________________________________________
Why am I writing this? What is the Purpose?
______________________________________________________________________________
________________
What do I already know about this topic? Brainstorm!
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Where can I get information about my topic?
______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________
Organize sheet-with student work:

Anchor Chart (additional information was added in future lessons)

 Student Marking on anchor text

C. Reflection and Critique

C. I designed this topic to provide my students with a meaningful learning experience and drive
them to write with passion. I was successful with this, my students who started as tentative
writers became excited about writing and saw its purpose and power. The students commented
that planning and organizing helped them think about what their paper was going to look like
and they were excited to start writing. The anchor chart was a useful reference tool throughout
the entire writing unit and I am glad we spent the time to make it as a class. I was very happy
with all of the scaffolds this stage of the writing process presented. The anchor text lesson was
very interactive, I had the paper projected on the whiteboard and students then came to the
board and used pre-made arrows to mark the opinion features. In the future I would have led the
students through the planning sheet, I think I transitioned them to the independent portion too
quickly. Since they were not familiar with planning prior to writing, they were a bit confused as t
what was expected of them.

Writing, Editing and Revising Strategies

A. My goals for Drafting, Editing, and Revising
a. My goal for drafting, editing, and revising writing lessons was for my students to compose at
least four well written paragraphs to support their opinion: an introduction, two (at least)
supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion.
B. Lesson and Evidence of the Drafting, Editing and Revising
b. During all of my writing lessons I provided scaffolds for my students to support them in the
writing process, I modeled, I used think alouds and constantly discussed what good writers do.
No matter what stage of the writing process we were at we were looking at writing together and
commenting on the good qualities of it and what would make it stronger. I would even have
students volunteer their own writing to go up on the projector for a class review. For drafting
students were given a graphic organizer, I modeled how to fill it out and how to use our other
resources to help us write. We did a mini lesson on transition words. Then, students got a less
scaffolded rough draft graphic organizer to put their writing into formal paragraphs. Then,
students typed their papers on their ipads using google docs, submitted them via google
classroom and I was able to print off their rough drafts. I wrote each of them a note on their
rough draft, as well as made some edits to get them thinking about how their writing could be
improved (as well as just mechanical mistakes that are typical when using computers). Then, I
taught several mini-lessons on revising our papers. Finally, when students had made their
writing more interesting, added, removed, and moved their writing, around they edited using
the CUPS strategy (me SRSD lesson). Throughout the entire unit I had several conferences
with each student. Many of my students have mentors/tutors that come once a week, I made
sure to fill the mentors in on what we were doing and encouraged them to be apart of their
child's writing process.
Transition words in students interactive notebooks:
Graphic Organizer 1:

Graphic Organizer 2-rough draft

Typed rough draft with note from me:
 Revising mini-lesson:

C. Reflection and Critique

C. There were a few hurdles during our writing process: 1) ESL students have a limited grasp on
proper English, this is reflected in their writing. What sounds correct to them usually does not
make sense to others. 2) topic and concluding sentences 3) editing. My students however rose
to the occasion and faced their struggles head on, and never gave up. I had students who were
eager to show me things they had changed to make their writing stronger and peer collaboration
that seemed to be out of a movie. All of the tedious steps we took before typing our paper led to
the unit being successful and not as overwhelming for my students. Each day they knew they
 had specific responsibilities and they never forgot what their end goal was. I believe I did a great
job of planning this unit to ensure its success, and that meant way more time on my end, but
also meant more meaningful student learning. The part of preparation that took the longest was
printing off each student's rough draft and then writing personal notes and edits to each student.
However, the looks on all of their faces when they got to read what I wrote them and then
diligently make some edits on their papers was priceless. Looking back I am so glad I did this
because it also acted as a model on how to edit and gave them a reference for when they had
to make final edits on their papers. In the future, I would have made an anchor chart with text
from the example of good opinion writing mentor text to have up during this unit to reference,
because some students lost their mentor text papers.

Principals and Effective Practices

A. Goals for teaching Principles and Effective Practices
a. My goals were: 1) make students realize the power and purpose writing has 2) Have students
compose a 4 paragraph opinion paper that included an introduction, conclusion and at least two
supporting paragraphs.
B. The teaching practices that I used during my lesson
b. I used many teaching practices through this unit, that include: examples and
nonexamples, anchor charts for support, transition word list for support, multiple graphic
organizers, SRSD lesson on editing, lessons on revising with support, interactive review of
writing, discussions at length of what good writers do, cross domain discussion of opinions,
transfer of control, modeling, explicit instructions, writing conferences and meaningful
publication.
C. Reflection
c. This unit was a labor of love. Writing is by far my students biggest struggle in school and
because many of them do not ever feel successful in writing they do not enjoy doing it. I wanted
to empower my students as writers and have them prove to themselves that they can be
successful (with the proper instructional support). I designed the topic to be something I knew
my students were passionate about and also something that they were already experts on (if
they knew it or not). In the future, I would have done more guided practice before moving to
independent writing.I feel this would have prevented confusion and students would have been
initially more successful when drafting.

Teaching tools and Practices

A. Goals for teaching tools
a. I have 28 ESL students, and I knew writing was a struggle for them. So, all of my teaching tools
HAD to offer writing support to them and make writing easier and more enjoyable.
B. Teaching tools used
b. I used a variety of teaching tools, they included: elmo for projecting and then marking it on
the whiteboard, arrows to marks text features of opinion writing, anchor chart display, ipads,
google docs, google classroom and connection with Grand Rapids State Rep.
C. Reflection
C. I felt that the tools I employed elevated this unit to new heights and it left each of my
students with a piece of written work that they were proud of. On our day of celebrating our
writing, I brought in cookies and students could volunteer to read their essay aloud in front of the
class or chose to have me read it for them. I was so proud of all of my students and the giant
gains they made during this unit. I taught the class how to address an envelope and put on
proper postage when I was preparing the papers to send to our Grand Rapids State
Representative.
Pictures of Writing sharing: