Using Quick Writes to Grow Your Writers
One of the biggest recommendations out there for improving student writing skills is to engage them in daily writing practice. However, surveys taken of elementary teachers and the way that their instructional time is structured showed that most students don’t spend a lot of time actually writing during the school week. There’s time for lots of mini-lessons and maybe some skill-level practice on a worksheet or within a graphic organizer, but the time to allow students to simply write on a blank piece of paper is minimal.
To me, giving students daily writing time is such a low-impact decision for a teacher to make. If you have a writing notebook, you don’t have to prep anything extra. You just need some daily writing prompts, and a good routine on how you plan to use them. Enter, the quick writes!
QUICK WRITES
Step One: Choose a daily 10-15 minute stretch to do quick writes. This could be during morning work, the beginning of your writing block, the work on writing station of your classroom, etc.
If you put your quick writes in a center, your kids may only have access to them once every 2-3 days or so, depending on how you structure your centers. I think you can still get the benefits this way! Especially if your students have daily writing happening at other points of the day through a reading response or some other journal.
Step Two: Decide if you want students to access the daily prompts digitally or via paper (you have both options through this download). Here are some ways that I thought you could use these:
You can project the powerpoint included in this product for all students to see, and set a timer.
You can put the quick writes on book rings and give every student their own set.
You can put the book rings in a work on writing station (as mentioned above), and students know that they must spend the first 10 minutes of their writing rotation journaling.
You could assign each student their own copy of the powerpoint, and have them journal digitally (this is a great option if you’re doing a version of distance learning this coming school year).
Step Three: When the time comes, give students a set time frame to just WRITE. I think 10-15 minutes provides enough time for students to get acclimated, think up some structure, and start writing.
Step Four: Use this time to circulate and encourage kiddos to keep going, not to correct them (at least not yet). The way that quick writes grow our students is they build stamina. They get them thinking quickly about a response to a prompt, and formulating a response independently. This happens in short spurts over time, so the growth is steady and gradual. Essentially, you’re exposing them to a miniature version of the writing process multiple times a week, instead of just once every few weeks when you do a big writing unit on skills they’ve never practiced.
I do not recommend using this time to circulate the room and correct kiddos on spelling, sentence structure capitalization, or anything else. That will come when you grade them (which I have an idea about that on this post here). Instead, use this time to inspire them to keep going! Get them to fall in love with the process, not obsess over perfection. THAT is how we will grow our students as writers.
Step Five: Maybe choose a student or two once a week (or however often time allows) to share one of their favorite responses. Create a writing community by sharing what the students are writing about as time goes on. We tend to isolate writing to this once-every-six-weeks experience where we write and write and write, share it, clap, and then put that experience away for another 4-6 weeks, until our new unit comes up in the standards.
I’m here to tell you that my job requires me to write every.single.day. I write emails. I write lesson plans. I write these blog posts. I write notes to teachers in my products. I write answers to buyer questions in my store.
My personal life requires that I write every.single.day. I write notes to my kid’s teachers. I write grocery lists. I write emails. I write text messages and Instagram comments, for crying out loud!
Writing is a daily act. Writing is a critical piece of being a person in the modern world, especially with phones in our pockets where the things that we write get archived for generations. We must teach our students to not only be comfortable with writing, but fall in love with it. They can achieve great things in this life if they do!
