Identifying and Applying Strategies for Teaching the Writing Process

Deciding on the central idea/topic of the writing. This step involves brainstorming, considering purpose and goals for writing, using graphic organizers to connect ideas, and designing a coherent structure for a writing piece. For students in grades 3-5, have them brainstorm individually or in small groups with a specific prompt, such as, \"Make a list of important people in your life,\" for example. Online graphic organizers might help upper elementary students to organize their ideas for specific writing genres during the prewriting stage. Examples are the Essay Map, Notetaker, or Persuasion Map.

Organizing information and building on ideas by choosing an appropriate organizational strategy: sequence of events, cause and effect, compare and contrast. Have students work independently at this stage. Confer with students individually as they write, offering praise and suggestions while observing areas with which students might be struggling and which might warrant separate conference time or mini-lessons.

Revising-Review draft and make necessary corrections for sentence usage (e.g. simple or compound), organization, and coherence. Editing-Review the draft for corrections in grammar, mechanics, and spelling. Show students how to revise specific aspects of their writing to make it more coherent and clear during mini-lessons. You can model reading your own writing and do a think aloud about how you could add more details and make it clearer. Teach students to reread their own work more than once as they think about whether it really conveys what they want to their reader. Reading their work aloud to classmates and other adults helps them to understand what revisions are needed. Your ELLs will develop greater language proficiency as they collaborate with their peers when revising.

Have students incorporate changes as they carefully write or type their final drafts.

Writing the final product ensuring its neatness and that it can be clearly understood. Encourage students to publish their works in a variety of ways, such as a class book, bulletin board, letters to the editor, school newsletter, or website.

Provide rubrics help to make expectations and grading procedures clear. Provide a formative assessment to guide and improve your instruction. Peer review, with clear guidelines for students to give feedback on each other's work, motivates students, allows them to discuss their writing with their peers. You can also have students can edit their own work using a checklist. Use mini-lessons, small-group lessons, or individual conferencing if necessary to make sure that students have made thoughtful changes to their writing content before moving on to the final draft.

A research process to consider when teaching research skills in middle school: •Form a question: Research should be targeted; develop a question you want to answer before progressing any further. •Decide on resources: Not every resource is good for every question/problem. Identify the resources that will work best for you. •Gather raw data: First, gather information in its rawest form; do not attempt to make sense of it at this point. •Sort the data: After you have the information in front of you, decide what is important to you and how you will use it. Not all data will be reliable or worthwhile. •Process information: Turn the data into usable information. This processing step may take longer than the rest combined. This is where you really see your data shape into something exciting. •Create a final piece: This is where you would write a research paper, create a project or build a graph or other visual piece with your information. This may or may not be a formal document. •Evaluate: Look back on the process. Where did you experience success and failure? Did you find an answer to your question?

1. Comprehension monitoring - This strategy involves knowing when the student's understanding breaks down and which \"fix-up\" strategies to apply (for example, rereading, reasoning the matter through and using cues from the sentence/paragraph's organizational structure). 2. Cooperative learning - Encouraging students toEngage with peers in problem-solving activities or to share ideas through peer-led discussions is another effective strategy. 3. Using graphic and semantic organizers (including story maps)providing the students with visual aids to understand the content better. 4. Answering questions 5. Generating questions - Teaching students to ask questions in order to understand various aspects of a text. 6. Understanding text structure helps to develop an awareness of how a writer organizes information to assist readers in recalling the content of a selection. 7. Summarizing-helps recap what has just been read, thus increasing comprehension.

The steps for paired reading are as follows: 1. Each student reads silently a selected, short piece of text. 2. One student identifies the main idea by summarizing the reading in his or her own words. The other student must agree or disagree and state why. 3. Both students must come to a consensus about the main idea of the text. 4. Next, each student takes a turn to identify text details that support the main idea. 5. Students read the next selection silently. They switch their previous roles and repeat the above steps. 6. Students can keep track of main ideas and details using Two-Column Notes.

As students read short selections appropriately assigned to them for independent reading, they use the following notations on the margins or sticky notes. Introduce text coding through modeled reading and text monitoring one or two codes at a time, gradually building up to all eight codes. = I Know This X = This is Not What I Expected * = This is Important ? = I Have a Question About This ?? = I am Really Confused ! = This Surprises Me L = I Have Learned Something New Here RR= I Have to Re-Read This Section

Students use Two-Column Notes while reading or listening to a text being read. After introducing, modeling, and practicing the use of this tool, provide ongoing opportunities for students to complete two-column notes in order to strengthen their ability to organize text information that can be the basis for further text analysis such as identifying pieces of data to support a conclusion or evaluating if evidence is substantial enough to support an author's claims. Two-Column Notes may be differentiated by placing partial information in one or both columns to help linguistically and academically diverse learners better understand and organize the main ideas and details of challenging texts. Students work alone, in pairs, or in teams to discern the best reason(s) why an event has taken place. The topics and main points of the event are either uncovered through the reading of the text or—to differentiate for some learners—are stated before the text is read. Students then must read or reread the text to gather additional evidence and draw their own conclusions.

*Text features are designed to facilitate readers. *Text features help readers locate/organize information from the text. *Headings, Sub-Headings, Main Ideas, Supporting Details. *Help link students with schema. *Variety of Text Structures: Recount, Report, Instructional, Explanation, Discussion, Persuasion, Narrative.

* Direct Instruction * Modeling * Guided Practice * Application

* Argue the case for a particular point of view. * Convince the reader to believe what you are writing about. *Convince the reader to buy your product or visit your attraction. Examples: book and film reviews, product advertisement, newspaper articles, advertisements, debates, brochures/leaflets, internet sites, letters to the editor. Who is persuasive writing for? People in authority who can change things, customers, people who want you to join a campaign, people who need to change their lifestyle.

1. Opening Statement - Explain the case. 2. Point(s) - Statement/Evidence 3. Summarize and Reinforce