Teaching Your Littles to Write Like Readers

Teachers always complain that their students are either strong, skilled, competent writers...or not so much.  How can we reach the writers that just don't seem to have what it takes?  

Mike Hanski from the "Huffington Post" writes, "Every author writes for readers; no grammar rules and writing techniques will help you understand your reader if you do not read yourself.  Enjoy what you read. It is difficult and mostly impossible to write something really good if you did not experience anything good that had been written already. Being a writer yourself, you have an ace in your sleeve: you can read a book with an eye for writing, though you do not even realize it.  Everything you learn as a reader, you can use as a writer afterward."

If we can infuse our students with a true joy of reading, can we also help them enjoy writing like a reader???  Think about it...as teachers we are constantly seeking strong examples of the great writing techniques we teach!  Why aren't we instilling these desires in our students?  Encouraging them to search for fantastic writing techniques in the authors they read will in turn motivate them to include those same writing techniques in their own writing!

This can be done in the simplest of ways:

1. Complete an Author Study:  Choose a favorite author and study his/her writing techniques.  Collect these on an anchor chart and refer to them throughout a writing unit, constantly challenging your students to mirror these writing techniques. 

2. Choose a technique you would like students to grow in and challenge them to find mentor texts that model it well for other students.  This encourages students to take ownership in their own learning and students will have a personal connection with the author's technique they sought out to find. 

Perhaps the simplest of strategies that I have used in my classroom has been to teach a reading skill and then apply it into my writing instruction.  I began with a reading standard and a writing standard that connected closely:  RI 4.2 Identifying Main Ideas and Supporting Details and W.4.2 Informational Writing. 

The most challenging text for young students to master in reading and writing seems to be informational text...however, once they are able to think how an author thinks, the missing link is found!  Students must learn how authors organize their writing before they are ready to create their own informational text in writing.  When they become the author themselves, they became more comfortable discussing the author's craft and organizational techniques used throughout the text and even...dare I say, critique the author's form themselves!  

My first task was to help students identify the main idea and supporting details of an informational text through reading (ergo RI 4.2).  We had many discussions about main supporting details versus minor supporting details--the reasons for each.   The purpose of this instruction would link directly to the writing later...it was necessary for students to understand how author's organize focused paragraphs before they could produce them themselves.  

Students helped create this connection visual to refer to when proving the main idea of a text.  These skills are vital when learning how to create focused informational paragraphs. 

This is an example of a resource I used throughout this unit to help students decipher major versus minor supporting details.  To purchase this unit, visit my TpT store here!

We began small...simply creating organized paragraphs with main idea topic sentences, following with major and minor supporting details.  We collected a variety of supporting details such as quotations from text, examples, facts, and definitions.  This is a must, or I warn you...you will read a thousand paragraphs with the exact sentence structure over and over.  No. Thank. You.  Students need to understand the value of variety.  No one wants to read definition after definition after definition.  Have students read informational paragraphs from an informative text of their choose and share with the class the variety they found. This will once again provide a personal connection for the students and encourage the transfer of this skill into their writing.   When my fourth graders were experienced readers in informational text, it was time to create informational writers!  It was THEIR turn to produce the information!

To find the informational writing unit, click the link!

Finally, students were prepared to create multi-paragraph informational writing.  It was important to teach the students to organize their own thinking like real writers. For each topic they could inform the reader about through the prompt, a new paragraph was necessary.   For example, the prompt, "Describe two instincts that some animals are born with to help them survive the cold winter months." allowed for two separate informational paragraphs--hibernation and migration.  Rather than provide students with a pre-made, beautifully created handout that is organized for them, we created our own in our writer's notebooks for each prompt following this teacher modeled handout.  As much as I love a pretty font and border...it had to go!  The more student input, the more ownership the student will put into the writing.  By the end of this unit, students had become well-rounded readers and applied the reading skills into their writing. This was the ultimate goal.  While we want students to become well composed writers, we must teach them be readers first and foremost!