Getting organized

As part of our study of the Six Traits of Writing, my students and I have been working on organization. This trait, which focuses on the structure of writing, is actually made up of several smaller sub-skills:

* Writing strong introductions, hooks, and leads
* Balancing creativity with formula
* Pacing & sequencing
* Use of thoughtful, interesting transitions
* Writing satisfying conclusions
* Creating strong & satisfying titles

As always, The Writing Fix has some great online resources. If you're looking for a strong intro sentence, try this prompt generator. At the click of a button, the site generates lines like these:

* He tried to remember who had talked him into this.
* I cared what she thought, so when she dared me I knew I was in trouble.
* She had been warned, but now it was too late.

To teach this trait, I've mostly been sticking with Vicki Spandel's series on the Six Traits, but I've also found this list of transitional words and phrases quite helpful.

Full of ideas

My students and I recently made it through the brainstorming stage, and I must say, facilitating this part of the process has not always been easy for me. When it comes to my own writing, I run through this stage automatically, barely aware that I'm doing it. At one point, my mind seems a bit like the blackboard in the photo to the left: I have a million ideas, but there's no sense of how they might work together. Some of the ideas will be kept, but most will not. Still, there's an energy to the process that keeps my mind moving, generating ideas until I hit upon the ones that will eventually stand out for me as the ones.

But just because I know how to do this with my own thoughts, does it necessarily mean that I know how to bring order to the thoughts in my students' heads? Or that I can always spark the energy and sense of urgency that get the ideas flowing in the first place?

I'm going to have to say no -- but as it turns out, that's OK, because there's a slew of (perfectly free!) material out there that's been helping me to accomplish it anyway.

As part of our work on the Six Traits of Writing, we are focusing on idea development, which involves recalling and recording memorable details. This graphic organizer on the five senses helped students to focus on what they observe in everyday situations. To make the activity more specific, I asked them to list what they would see, hear, taste, smell and touch at the following locations: a bakery, a beach, an amusement park, and a playground. Then we worked to come up with language that was more precise and descriptive, and students recorded the words they planned to use. For example, at a bakery we said we would smell aromas wafting through the air; at a beach we would feel the grittiness of the sand in our shoes; and at an amusement park we might hear the whine of the machinery as a ride got off the ground.

I also love these idea development post-it notes, which say things like, "I used a balance of showing and telling," and "My details try to paint a picture in the reader’s head." I affixed a checklist on each child's paper. For first drafts, they used these idea development worksheets , which also feature a checklist at the end.

I would also like to try the describing wheel , which seems like it would be great for taking a single detail and coming up with many interesting ways to describe it. To identify the audience and refine purpose, I like this planning chart. The inverted triangle is good for narrowing down a topic.

Idea development: getting started

The first of the Six Traits of Writing that I'll be tackling with my students is idea development, which can actually be broken down into a number of sub-skills:

* using strong and memorable details
* balancing showing and telling
* writing about unique topics
* developing an original idea within a safe frame
* exploring themes and theses, big topics and sub-topics
* self-reflecting to write about what you know

It's amazing what resources teachers are willing to share online. I'm currently smitten with WritingFix, which has an entire section on idea development. On the same site, I also found the following song, attributed to "Mrs. Stelle." Thanks, Mrs. Stelle!

Ideas
To the tune: She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain
by Mrs. Stelle

Can you tell me what makes up a good idea?
Can you tell me what defines a good idea?
A single topic, clear and focused,
with fresh insights that provoke us,
anecdotes “though not required”
can cinch the deal.

If your story is a bore or moves too slow,
if it wanders off the topic it’s a “NO”,
you must answer readers’ questions
using details and suggestions
all while telling us what
we don’t already know.

If you want for your ideas to score a four,
then you’ll have to spin a yarn that gives us more,
than just a list of things you did once
that impressed the other kids once--
we’ve all read a thousand papers
before yours!

What's the score?

Critiquing sample essays can be a great way to show what does and doesn't work in a piece of writing. However, I don't like to put my students on the spot with their peers, particularly when I'm trying to show the difference between strong and weak writing. That's why I'm glad there are so many sample essays online. At The Writing Site, which offers tips on how to score student work, I found this list of exemplars for fourth-grade narrative writing. You can select other grades and genres here.

I chose three of their sample essays about being invisible, which ranged in strength from weak to very strong. After starting class with a review of the Six Traits, my students and I read through the essays and then rated them using a very basic rubric. The kids got really into this exercise. By comparing the three essays, they were able to easily identify what was missing in the weaker ones and what made the strong piece so compelling. They also had plenty of advice for the writers!

Could you be more specific?

One of the most surefire ways to create vivid writing is to be highly specific. Don't say loud to describe a sound that is actually piercing or blaring. Don't say slow when what you mean is sluggish or creeping.

Finding just the right word when you need it can be a challenge for anyone, but for students who speak a language other than English at home, the pool of descriptive words from which to draw may not be nearly as deep as it could be. That's why it's so essential to provide enriching vocabulary in the classroom -- which actually benefits all students.

I recently ordered a set of word wall posters from the Teach Me Writing curriculum. (While my preference is to find free online resources whenever possible, I gladly paid for these and found them well worth the money.) The posters -- 43 in all -- offer alternatives to commonly used words of all kinds, including general verbs, adjectives that describe emotions, and so-called "over-used words." In all, they offer 263 enriching vocabulary words that can be posted in class.

Among the vivid verbs to replace look, move and take were glance, trudge and snatch. To describe precisely how things sound, look, smell, taste and touch, we have words like rustle, hazy, reek, tangy and crisp. I'm planning to rotate the posters on a word wall and have students copy the words in their binders to create personal dictionaries. These can later be used when they're stumped for just the right word in just the right spot.

Of course, you don't need posters to help expand your students' vocabulary. Try this lesson from About.com's ESL page. Create a worksheet with two columns. In the first, write a list of about 10 basic words such as walk, move, hold and drink. In the second, write a longer list that includes more specific words such as stagger, writhe, clutch and gulp. Have students match all of the specific words from the second column to the general ones listed in column one. I'm planning to use this with the help of a thesaurus.

Your best traits

My students and I have begun using the Six Traits of Writing model in class and are working to answer one basic question: "What is good writing?"

The Six Traits, shown at right, provide a common language and framework for describing the characteristics of good writing. Still, evaluating a piece of student work can be very subjective, which is why I've become a big fan of rubrics. A rubric is a scoring tool that lists specific criteria and objectives for an assignment. It explicitly states what is expected and how the quality of a student's work will be rated. For my class, I'm consulting a number of rubrics based on the Six Traits of Writing, but here is a particularly student-friendly one I like.

In addition to discussing the rubric with my students, I'll be posting descriptions of each trait on a bulletin board. Web sites that feature some basic posters can be found here and here.

I've written about the Writing Process before, and I should mention that the Six Traits model is not a replacement for it. Rather, the two work together. The Six Traits describe the components that make up a quality piece of writing, while the Writing Process offers a step-by-step path to creating it.

What Would J.K. Rowling Do?

Yesterday my students and I discussed why some writing is so compelling to read. Since they're in grades four to six, there are lots of Harry Potter fans, and they tried to articulate just what makes a Harry Potter book so hard to put down. One student put it this way: "When I'm reading it, I feel like I'm right there in it. And even though I know it's not true, I ask myself, 'How is this not true? How is this just fantasy?'"

We considered things like how the books were organized, the voice the author had developed, the research that must have gone into each book in the series, and how easily the language flowed.

Then we talked about how the author, J.K. Rowling, might have moved through the various stages of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and finally publishing. How did she narrow down the topic? What helped her figure out what to say first and how the events should be sequenced and paced? How did she determine which types of revisions to make? And how much of the editing had she ultimately done herself?

This exercise helped to reinforce that whenever we're in the middle of a piece of writing, there is so much to sort, sift through, develop and change -- which is why we must all take things step by step. Even J.K. Rowling.