Elementary Writing Program

WritingCity is our new writing program, I'm real excited about it.  I saw this blog post about how it serves as a great elementary writing program. 

And I'll quote a little:

WritingCity, previously WriteStepsWriting, provides:

detailed day by day lesson plans

the authentic student writing samples as examplars

the videos so the mini-lessons could be done in literacy centers rather than in whole class sessions by the teacher

The blending of key writing strategies including Writer’s Workshop, 6 Trait Writing,   Bloom’s Taxonomy, Multiple Intelligences, Marzano’s Instructional Strategies, and Cooperative Learning

The balance of using prompts that are response to reading versus more open-ended prompts

Teaching writing of course is very difficult in elementary schools since the teachers aren't dying to spend time reivewing the kids writing and the kids aren't always that excited about struggling with sentences. But getting them writing early is always a great idea.

Learning to Write

There are many approaches to learning to write but let me discuss a few here. The Writers Workshop, pioneered at NY Colleges, is real popular. The idea is that there's a little mini lesson and then, wahoo, lets each write.  It's about writing.
Lucy Caukins is often the prof most associated with taking WW into the K12 population.  The most popular current effective implementation of Writers Workshop is WritingCity.

Settings for Handwriting Practice

Anotehr approach is for students to take single courses where they get minilessons and then practice specific isolated skills. Works for many kids. For this, use Time4Writing! here are some great materials from Time4Writing;

• Grammar  Sentence Structure   Paragraph Writing   Essay Writing  Narrative Writing   Informative Writing
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• However, the most popular way by volume for writing is VocabularySpellingCity's Sentence Writing Practice . It used literally by hundreds of thousands of kids every year. Almost as popular for Writing Practice for Elementary Students is the Paragraph Writing Practice,

Lastly, do not forget that there is an important role for handwriting worksheets to practice developing handwriting skills, particularly in early elementary.

Sorry dear reader about the fonts. It's too hard to sort out. Sigh.