Starting to Write

Writing is a daunting task for my kids. Well in fairness, it’s a struggle for a lot of kids, even “neurotypical” students. (This is the word I’ve just been taught to use to refer to “normal” kids.) So I had them compete some worksheets that I made that were intended to get their ideas flowing and to provide a place for them to write notes or facts that they had learned from our previous web exploration of the presidency.

Now I’ve done speeches for 5 previous years and we do at least 2 additional full essays each year so I’ve done the “get started writing” day dozens of times. I was shocked at how well it went. Now I realize that writing stuff on an electronic board may not seem all that different than providing a typed outline or writing directly on a white board. I can’t fully explain the difference or why it’s so much better. Maybe the kids instinctively pay more attention to something that has the tech appeal. But I also think that being able to go back and forth between “boards” without erasing lets me provide more information because I know I’m not going to just erase it in a minute or two.
So what I did was create 5 boxes representing the 5 paragraphs. At first I just made the boxes and I put the topic sentence in each box for them. I told them they could either copy my sentence or put it in their own words. I see this more as modeling technique than simply giving away answers. Anyway, after I wrote down the outline, I selected the bottom 4 paragraph boxes and shifted them down giving myself space to make more notes about the first paragraph. I noticed that this helped the kids see the structure of an essay. I often have problems with kids who try to write down all the main ideas first and then realize they don’t have space to write the details. They get frustrated with erasing. I think by seeing the writing space on the board it helped them better understand the scaffold of the entire essay. Whatever the cause or reason, I did not have a single student make more than a basic structuring error and that is astonishing.

I kept the notes displayed by opening Smart Notebook twice and putting one page up on one sides and the other page up on the other. There may be an easier way to display to “boards” at one time but this worked for us.