Teaching Students to Write a Strong Hook | Teaching Writing
Read these sentences:
“Tonight, when I looked under the bed for my monster, I found this note instead”.
“I have dreams about those shoes. Black high-tops. Two white stripes”.
“Whenever young Mary Walker was tired, she would shield her eyes from the sun and watch the swallow-tailed kites dip and soar above the trees. That must be what it’s like to be free, she thought.”
Ok, now let me ask you some questions about this:
1.) Did any of these sentences make you feel anything?
2.) Did any of these sentences leave you wondering a few things? Like, who is this story about? What is going to happen next, etc?
I’d venture to bet that, yes, these sentences evoked something out of you. Because they are good sentences.
To directly quote Where the Crawdads Sing (a great book, but for adults only): ‘That’s a very good sentence.’
These sentences are the very first sentences from the following books:
-I Need My Monster, by Amanda Noll
-Those Shoes, by Maribeth Boelts
-The Oldest Student: How Mary Walker Learned to Read, by Rita Lorraine Hubbard
You may know these books already. You may own them and teach with them, but you may have never noticed the hook before.
You’re probably thinking now: OK. I clicked on this article because it was about teaching hooks and she is just now getting there?
But, assuming you started at the beginning and read this far, that’s totally the point. The hook is there to draw you in. I led with other author’s hooks to get my point across, but the affect remains the same. You read some interesting sentences, you were curious where I was going to take you, and you kept reading.
And now you’re here, and wondering HOW to get your students to create sentences that will hook their readers in! I have four steps to follow to get your students writing with beautiful hooks, in no time!
Teaching Hooks in Writing
Let your students see this for themselves. I just pulled three hooks from picture books that were literally sitting in front of me on my home office desk. How many more could your students find?? If you haven’t noticed how powerful the first sentence of a picture book can be in your own teaching practices, do you think your students have taken note? I suggest letting students comb through books in your classroom, and journaling 3-5 beginning sentences that evoked some sort of thought or emotion out of them!
Model, model, and model some more! Listen. If you are teaching children, and your go-to strategy is not to model the thing you want kids to do for themselves, we need to take a trip back to basics real quick. But, for those of you who always planned to model what writing a hook may look like, I want to extra-emphasize the importance of this step! You need to show the kids what it looks like to take their text as it is, and find a really interesting way to kick things off! I have more info about this coming in this same blog post, so hang with me!
Follow that I Do, We Do, You Do Model. If I had a penny for every time I reference the zone of proximal development on this blog, I would have…a lot of pennies. Show them how to write a hook by modeling it. Let them practice through a guided activity, then let them apply what they just learned to their own writing. These principles remain no matter the grade, the genre, or the classroom. Slowly releasing responsibility transfers skills to your students better than anything!
Peer Workshop Chances are that your students are the target audiences for each other, so they are the most valuable critics you could offer your young writers. Break students into groups, and have them share the hooks they’ve come up with writing, then provide feedback. From here, it’s so easy to get buy-in from your students, because they know how their peers feel about what they’re writing!